Nursery rhymes and folk songs

In the 1940s and 1950s we were taught nursery rhymes and traditional songs as a matter of course. In our family, we had some of the Uncle Mac Nursery Rhyme 78rpm records, on which adults with astoundingly posh accents sang their way through all the standard rhymes to a piano accompaniment ("Humpty Dumpty", "Jack and Jill", "Three Blind Mice" ...). Uncle Mac (Derek McCulloch), famous for hosting the popular "Children’s Favourites" radio programme on a Saturday morning, concluded the final record by urging children to keep singing the rhymes - "They belong to you and no one can take them away from you!" (Small British Children Unite against Hitler?)

When we were older, we learnt traditional songs at school, sometimes along with a radio programme - "Westering Home", "Dashing Away with a Smoothing Iron", "The Oak and the Ash". I still have at home an old copy of Novello’s "New Fellowship Song Book" and even a copy of the big "News Chronicle Song Book" which I bought locally secondhand (awarded as first prize to Bessie House in Keighley for Punctuality and Good Attendance).

Books of nursery rhymes are still available, and people buy them for their young children or grandchildren but decent audio versions are thin on the ground, and I wonder how many people know the tunes these days?

Folk songs are much harder to find. The only book I can find is the little Penguin "English Folk Songs" (Vaughan Williams and A L Lloyd) - a great collection, and even including some ballads, but mostly without the ones we learnt, and the print and music are rather too small to be of practical use. Sheet music for Irish and Scottish folk songs abounds - but what’s happened to the English ones? (I suppose the Welsh ones may be available in Welsh - we learnt the ones we knew in English). And what’s happened to the collections of traditional ballads there used to be? I can only see a few big academic collections.

Maybe collections of regional folksongs is the way forward but I haven't spotted any of those either.

Can anyone recommend anything? Shouldn't our children be taught our traditional songs in school? The makers of popular TV programmes, both fiction and non-fiction, are clearly aware that people enjoy finding out about our workaday history.

Sea shanties, thank goodness, have survived much better, both in book and audio form - thanks to the likes of locally-based Kimber’s Men. - Felicity

PS It's a real pain you can't say stuff like this without sounding as though you support David Cameron or worse. Can we not reclaim English culture and history for the left and liberals? 

UPDATE: Since writing the above I've found and ordered for the shop a big book by A L Lloyd - Folk Song in England - 

"A seminal work by one of the most influential figures of the English folk revival of the 1950s, "Folk Song in England" (1967) is an expansive account of the development of English traditional song, from the very oldest, ritual verse, through epic balladry, to the development of lyrical song in the industrial era. In a unique and ambitious approach, Lloyd marries the tradition of folk-song scholarship, largely derived from Cecil Sharp, with the radical historiography of E. P. Thompson, and in so doing produces a work of exceptional insight. In particular, his defining of 'industrial folk song' reveals traditional verse as an ebullient, living expression of the working people, perfectly adaptable to reflect their ways and conditions of life."

Sounds good!