glueman: "there is sufficient evidence of syuzhet and fabula in your average Child ballad to infer authorship."

I must admit I had to Google "syuzhet and fabula" to have a clue what that sentence meant - it might have been clearer to us plebs had you used nice simple synonyms like "story" and "narrative".

Many Child ballads exist in scores of variants. A given ballad may be set to tunes with wildly differing melodic or rhythmic structures; possess several alternative refrains; tell its tale using substantially different texts; tell subtly different tales using substantially the same text; be virtually unrecognizable from one version to another, save for the general plotline or a couple of key stanzas. Moreover, Child himself found analogues of many of his ballad types in European and Eastern folktales, and some ballads are clear descendents of medieval romances. These pieces did not originate, fully-formed, at some identifiable point in time, and stay that way. There was no 17th-century Dylan or MacColl churning out ballads we could point to as THE definitive versions.

Suibhne wrote: "Variations occur by way living morphology and deliberate transformation - which are most assuredly not the random by-product of some fanciful collectivity dreamed of by the gentry..."

This is a travesty of current understanding of song evolution. Nobody said that individual singers didn't improve songs deliberately - quite the opposite. We do have a plethora of mondegreens to demonstrate the 'Chinese Whispers' theory of evolution by accident, but there's plenty of evidence too of ingenious individual creativity.

"Likewise, I feel, with Traditional Folk Songs & Ballads the masters were very often the traditional singers themselves"

That's what I feel, too, Suibhne - where, if not from individual singers, did all those wonderfully varied tunes come from? It's also precisely what I understand by the term 'Folk Process' that you like to vilify. To pass off all that creativity (maybe not 'collective' but surely 'sequential') as the work of a an elite class of bygone songwriters is to rob the working class singers you so admire of their due credit.