It is not the slightest 'wee bit pekuliar' that John Reilly had the ballad 'Well Below The Valley'; he also had Lord Gregory and Lord Bateman. Tom Munnelly's vast collecting work in Ireland was turning up dozens of ballads which had disappeared elsewhere.
Directly from Travellers he also got Thomas of Winesbury, Lambkin and Young Hunting, and indirectly, Lord Thomas and The Brown Girl, The Cruel Mother and Fair Margaret and Sweet William (Ch 74), all originally learned from Traveller sources. Pat Mackenzie and I recorded The Grey Cock, and Lord Randall in full, and part versions of Famous Flower of Serving Men and Lord Gregory. Up to the mid-seventies in our experience the most popular ballad in the Travelling community was The Outlandish Knight, closely followed by Edward.
The Irish Travellers' singing tradition was totally uninfluenced by literacy; very few Travellers could read at all and those tiny few who could had such a rudimentary grasp of reading for it to have no effect whatsoever on their song repertoires. Ironically, their influence on the settled repertoires was through print; the trade of 'Ballad Selling', selling song-sheets at the fairs and markets in rural Ireland, carried on to the mid-fifties. We have long, detailed descriptions of Travellers reciting their songs across the counter to printers, who then produced them to be sold locally - the trade was carried out almost exclusively by Travellers and the material included everything from popular songs of the day to those taken from their own oral repertoires (Little Grey Home In The West, Smiling Through, Betsy Of Ballentown Brae, Willie Leonard, Early in The Month of Spring, The Blind Beggar... etc.)   
Even among the settled, literate population the influence of literacy was a complicated one; very few singers we recorded in rural Ireland learned songs directly from print; rather they used printed texts as very rough guides to what they already knew, or altered the songs from the page so totally as for them to bear little resemblance to the 'original'.
Our main problem in discussing traditional singing is that we have virtually no information on the subject from the horse's mouth - from the singers themselves. Collectors appear not to have thought it worthwhile asking their sources about their songs and singing, rather preferring to speculate and theorise themselves on such 'weighty matters'. One of these once commented on Walter Pardon's ability to separate his traditional songs (Walter always used the word 'folk') from his music hall and early pop songs; "How would he know the difference - he's just a simple countryman?"
It has always seemed to me more than a little 'pekuliar' to treat with scepticism, or even to reject outright, what little evidence we have from our source singers - I wonder are there any solid grounds for thinking John Reilly's having The Well Below The Valley "a wee bit pekuliar", or for 'Sceptical Steve's' scepticism? I believe that the way to an understanding of our song traditions is to pool what little information we have rather than treating it with the suspicion it so often gets.
Tom Munnelly's recordings of John Reilly, along with the other 22,000-odd songs he collected, are housed at University College Dublin and also at The Irish Traditional Music Archive in Merrion Square, Dublin.
Apart from the Topic album 'Bonny Green Tree', Peter Kennedy issued (without permission) 'pirated' recordings on Folktrax; I know Dick Greenhause was attempting to sort out the problems connected with these; don't know if he ever did.
Jim Carroll