Three drifting thoughts of, maybe, marginal interest:

(1) I was present at the spontaneous creation of a 'new' song by training corps cadets at an RAF base in Wales in the 1940s. We had just had a lecture by a warrant officer on venereal disease, the amateur prostitutes outside the gates of the base and card-carrying registered prostitutes in foreign lands, which we found so hilarious (we were that young) that a song began to emerge almost at once. In a crowd of around twenty cadets, three or four of the more articulate youths - not me, I was merely observing - took the lead and began to put words together. The whole process took about twenty minutes, producing two verses with hardly a pause for discussion.   The tune was, of course, a common one, 'John Brown's Body', and the words scanned and rhymed ('Warrant officer Williams is a crafty so-and-so; He searches for his women by the lighted matches' glow' etc, then chorus: 'Glory, glory, where's yer blue card?'). For our last week at the base it was sung on the march and in the Nissen hut. Within another week, it was totally forgotten, the reason for its existence having faded from the short memories of teenagers. Some songs live and die and leave no trace.

(2) When I was about four or five, my sister taught me a version of the Swapping Song ('My father died, I know not how') which has stayed with me for well over seventy years. When, in my thirties, I began to be interested in folk song, I saw a published version (now identifiable as Roud 469), which I supposed must have been how my sister had first learned it, probably at elementary (i.e primary) school. I saw at once that what I had taken from her did not completely match the printed source, but the variations were easily explained by the simple mishearings of a four year old learning from a twelve year old. Interesting thing is, that I wouldn't change a word or a note of our 'original', which I actually prefer to the printed version. No vanity here. Just a deep-rooted feeling that this song is hers and mine and I want to keep it that way.

(3) When, a bit later, my working life led me into the study of theatre buildings and their history, I became aware of the importance of the little eighteenth and early nineteenth century theatres, that were built in their hundreds around the country. They were built to accommodate circuit companies that made the rounds of a dozen or more identical market town theatres in the course of a year. Because the law relating to dramatic performance made it impossible for them to present straight drama without music, they developed a hybrid entertainment with songs interspersed into every play and with a variety of completely unrelated solo songs, duets and hornpipes, etc, between the acts (one of the reasons, incidentally, that music hall entertainment was able to develop so quickly in the 1840s and 50s, when the laws governing theatres were liberalised). Such theatres, which served all levels of local society under one roof, were clearly a potent force in disseminating and popularising songs.   They also needed a constant supply of such material, which they created anew, or adopted from more upmarket theatres' presentations or 'took into care', giving a theatrical polish to existing popular songs that were already familiar to the audience.   Many such songs found their way into print in play texts, in songsters and on broadsides and from thence into (or back to?) the folk repertoire.

        If I have a point in all this (and you may be beginning to doubt it) it is that, whilst songs of sublime beauty have been created and perfected by 'the folk', without benefit of writing or print, there are many songs in the folk repertoire that clearly did not originate in this way but had literate authors. Whether their names are traceable or not, you don't need a degree in folk studies or theatre history to tell you that such songs as 'The Garden Gate' or the 'Feast Song' ('Our sweet pretty dairymaid's praise') are the works of individual authors, labouring with pen, ink and perspiration over each verse. That they had a sure instinct for the tastes of the society they were writing for/about is obvious, otherwise their songs would not have survived in oral tradition long enough to be collected.

Enough rambling. Jim and Steve. Back to the serious argument. Don't go quiet on us now.