The collectors of folk culture idealized the past in order to condemn the present. The rural worker the peasant was mythologized as a figure of nature a Nobel savage walking the country lanes and working without complaint the fields of his or her betters the living evidence of and a link to a purer and more stable past. The urban-industrial worker however was fixed firmly in the present completely detached from any salvation the past may have been able to offer. Proof of a fall from grace was there for all to see in the unban-industrial worker’s unquenchable taste for the corrupt and corrupting songs of the music hall.
Whereas the middle class could be encouraged to connect to a more organic past by embracing folk songs the working class would have to be forcefully schooled in folk song in the hope of softening their urban and industrial barbarism especially as it was made manifest in their enjoyment of the songs of music hall. In his “Inaugural Address to the folk song society at the door of folk music which is driving it out namely the common popular songs of the day; and this enemy is one of the most repulsive and most insidious. Music hall is presented as symptomatic of the supposedly degraded culture of the urban working class. As he explains,
If one thinks of …terribly overgrown towns… where one sees all around the tawdriness of sham jewellery and shoddy clothes…and people who, for the most part have the most false ideals, or none at all … who think that the commonest rowdyism is the highest expression of human emotion; it is for them that the modern popular music is made, and it is made with commercial intention out of snippets of musical slang