Cap'n
Collectors collect for a whole host of reasons and for a whole spectrum of material.
Many do it for unfamiliar songs or versions, others to put recordings of field singers out on albums - which have been an inspiration to people like me for near half a century, as a singer and a researcher.
It has certainly never has been an aim - or not for a long time, to collect in order to find the best singing - most of our traditional singers when they were recorded (certainly in England) were past their prime, many of them hadn't sung for decades and were dragging their songs out of a long unused memory store.
We were recording mainly to gain as much information as we could of an all but disappered song tradition before it went altogether.
You will never in a million years get something like that from a revival singer, no matter how good he or she is.
Sitting in a folk club with a tape recorder isn't 'collecting' - it's sitting in a folk club with a tape recorder
"oral transmission only"
I don't know of a collector who uses this as a yardstick.
As Steve Gardham points out, many of our songs were passed to the singer via broadsides and owe their currency to this.
Here in Ireland the 'ballad' trade, the selling of songsheets at fairs and markets, which lasted to the mid fifties, was possibly the major single influence on the Irish song tradition.
We certainly never recorded a singer who didn't learn some of his or her songs from a 'ballad'.
The oral tradition was certainly a vital element in the transmission of songs, but it wasn't an exclusive factor.
Jim Carroll