" ...underwent significant changes almost immediately after they were taken up"

I'm sure it did but this always begs the question - but were those changes actually improvements?

I'm forever finding versions of songs which have a crucial fact or notion missing, without which the story no longer makes any sense. But you can tell by the quality of the word-smithing that there was a skilled canny writer behind the original work.

For example: Compare 'The Bloody Gardener' and 'The Bloody Garden.' The Carthy/Swarb version is largely the same as the one Maud Karpeles collected in Newfoundland, in which the motivation of the gardener to killing the girl is not explained (one assumes he was just a psychopath), so when the lad goes home and blames his mum is makes no sense at all (even though she's mentioned in verse one is beng disapproving of the marriage). Yet the Peacock version (also from Newfoundland) has these extra verses - which I'd wager a tenner are by the original writer:

His mother, false and cruel, wrote a letter to his jewel,
And she wrote it in a hand just like his own;
Saying, "Meet me here tonight, meet me here, my heart's delight,
In the garden gay nearby my mother's home."

The gardener agreed oh, with fifty pounds indeed,
To kill this girl and lay her in the ground;
And with flowers fine and gay oh, her grave to overlay,
That way her virgin body ne'er shall be found...

And suddenly it all makes sense.

I'd submit that here the oral process has merely weakened a well-written song, to the point where it no longer holds water from a story-telling point of view (and that was, after all, the whole point).

So why is it that we so often put the process higher than the original creation?

Tom