That's a perfectly good point, Greg. All I would say, though, is that with the recordings you're talking about someone other than the artist would have been taking care of the actual recording process, whether with a hand-held mic into a portable tape machine or some other sort of equipment.

Alan Lomax didn't turn up with a tape recorder and expect the people he was recording to operate it themselves. He did the technical stuff and let them pay attention to the performance.

Plus one of the reasons why those old recordings have stood the test of time is that the person making the recording made a decision to record that artist (and then publish the results) rather than the artist deciding to make their own CD in the shed. These guys knew what they were doing.