The old English broadsides of popular songs were a booming business for printers from around 1500 through the 1700s - and they're in the folk tradition now, if they are still sung at all (because while they were liberally borrowed and printed they were rarely attributed to an author, is my understanding). People go back to the Bodlean and many other sources to find the original sheets.

I first learned about some of this from a lecture by Lucie Skeaping of the BBC "Early Music Show" back in 2007. Here is the notice I posted at Mudcat about her lecture. That link suggests several good sources.

Johnny B. Goode (a poor choice to begin with) doesn't have the filter of time and the folk process of different printers taking the same words and putting them in a different tune, or vice versa, as occurred with those early printed songs. It hasn't gone through different performers passing it on as they remember it, building in changes along the way. There may be different arrangements, yes, but it is essentially still the same song: the copyright laws certainly play a role in how much a modern song can be changed. Let alone the many forms of recording and record keeping of words and music that make gradual change less likely. Intentional change yes, but is that the same as the "folk process" as I've heard Barre Toelken and Michael Cooney describe it? No.

You'd be better off starting this discussion with something like Sloop John B or looking at songs by John Jacob Niles that almost sound like folk songs from the start, or songs collected and arranged by Percy Grainger. Then you'd have some real meat to fight over!

SRS