[Closed] Anybody here interested in English women folk singers?

....may I ask your opinion?

How did the English women folk singers develop their odd style of singing? I was in the car yesterday and heard a 30 minute programme with Annie Briggs, which contained some of her songs. I've no doubt she's talented and she has a huge personality but her studied nutty non-conformity really began to grate, especially when she sang exactly in the style of so many other English woman folk singers.

I don't enjoy hearing a classically-trained soprano warbling her way through a 1960s pastiche of a traditional English folk song (I'm thinking of people like Joan Sutherland here) as I find that kind of adoption of vernacular music irritatingly smug and patronising. But the standard way as practiced by numerous women singers from Maddy Prior and Sandy Denny to Kate Rusby seems to be to try to sound like a drunk medieval barmaid; they sing through their noses in an over-loud voice, deliberately slightly flat, with an affected west country accent. Who ever told them that English folk had to be performed in this way? Before people like Bert Lloyd began to revive public interest in folk, most people wouldn't have heard a folk song performed so where did it come from?

Usual disclaimers here; I accept that not all women folk singers adopt this style and that there's also an Irish and a Scottish way of singing folk songs but I find those a good deal less grating and false.

Any thoughts?