Stilly River Sage,

I wasn't necessarily saying it isn't so. Just that we don't know it's so.

For a folklorist, usually demonstrating that a song has been in the oral tradition for some length of time is a prerequisite to calling it a folk song. In the case of old texts, that is waived to some extent, but usually a folklorist would then wish to see multiple versions show up in manuscripts, to verify that it was at least traveling around being folk-processed, as it were.

So what do we do with a song as old as Sumer is Icumen In that doesn't exist in several versions and cannot be shown to have been in oral tradition? It's a toss up. Frankly, we're lucky it survived in even ONE manuscript, folksong or not! So I think most folklorists would rule "no decision." It may have been a folksong, or maybe not. Maybe more people know it now than then because it has since been printed and disseminated. We have no evidence that anyone other than the monks at Reading Abbey ever heard it until modern times, and indeed no real evidence that even THEY ever heard it, although one of them wrote it down at some point! This doesn't make it textually any less interesting.

By the way, Sumer probably is not "folk" in origin either. It seems to have been written by one or more monks, and it is musically more complicated than most "folk" songs, being arranged in its only manuscript appearance for four tenor and two bass voices. It is the earliest example of canon, of six part music, and of ground bass, suggesting that these were PROBABLY not well-established folk traditions at the time, though such an early date makes any such statement tenuous. Anyway, for most folkorists, "folk" origin is a red herring, since many folksongs originated among the upper classes, and many more originated in mass culture.

SRS and I have locked horns over this on previous threads, so let me clarify that saying this does not denigrate the creativity of the rural working classes! It's just that they adapt as many songs from elite and mass culture origins as they create themselves--and why shouldn't they?