'most of us consider the child ballads as folk songs,[whatever Mike tries to suggest otherwise]'

I didn't suggest otherwise - of course they are all folksongs, of the particular genre called ballads. All I pointed out was that Child himself was more interested in the words than the tunes, and didn't ever claim or purport to be producing a song collection, of the sort that Bruce & Stokoe were approx simultaneously doing in Northumberland, for example; he just didn't regard that as the brief he had set himself. So he worked from printed, rather than oral, sources, & did no original collecting of his own. Nothing against him or his work: he was an academic engaged in compiling an academic accretion of all the previous printed sources he could find, and that was all he professed to be doing.