Hey, whatever HAPPENED to Elsie??

This thread reminds me so much of Herbert Hughes writings, that I had to go back to his introduction to Vol.4 to add this quote,
"To the folk-lorist, as to the sociologist, the present phase of our national life presents an unprecedented spectacle. With the creation of a limited Free State has come the intensive cultivation of Irish in the national schools. This has raised problems, economic and scholastic, which it is not my business to discuss here. The policy, far-seeing though it may be, is, however, having curious paradoxical reactions in the domain of folk-music. Partly through a desire for standardisation, and partly through the modifications created by music print, the old rhapsodic beauty of such songs as [two title printed in a Gaelic type font] is being shorn and trimmed into a neat Anglicisation which it is the very object of authorities to avoid. Children with beautiful voices, singing in unison and phrasing with admirable unanimity, are unconsciously helping on this deadly work day by day, and unless the matter is taken in hand now the next generation, brought up even more effectively on compulsory Irish, will receive a tainted and discredited legacy.
This is a danger, of course, that does not confront the more modern Anglo-Irish ballads of the kind included in these pages. These are songs of leisure and relaxation sung in the kitchen or round the public-house fire, songs that conform more easily than do the traditional Irish to the notation of the tempered scale. More than once I have had to abandon the attempt to make an air fit into the conventional five-lines-and-four-spaces of a musical clef, a difficulty that generally besets the "collector" of Irish tunes. The question of harmonisation I have fully discussed in previous volumes, and I need only admit once more that much of the essential character of an old song is lost the moment it is brought into contact with harmony - in other words, with the piano. At the best, it is created anew, and if the spirit is retained that is all the interfering musician can hope for."