"Broadsides, sheet music, and recordings show us how a piece starts out" There is absolutely no evidence whatever that this is the case - if you have discovered a sure way to prove how folksongs began - who knows, there might be a Nobel on offer somewhere. What little work we managed to do on 'ballad' sellers in Ireland indicates that they went for their material to the tradition or to popular songs of the time; when asked if they composed the songs they sold the reply was "why bother, there was plenty to choose from all round us?" The seller we spent a great deal of time with described how he (a non-literate Traveller) went to the printer and recited his father's songs (The Blind Beggar, Early in the Month of Spring, Gradh Geal Mo Chroi The Herring….) over the counter and had him run off as many songs sheets as were required. With respect to Steve Gardham, in my opinion all that has anybody has managed to do is to research songs back to the first time they appeared in print. There is no way of proving one way or the other whether any given song existed before it went into print or was just lifted from the tradition - which appears to be the argument put forward by broadside experts like Leslie Shepherd, and even as far back as Charles Hindley. Izaac Walton, in his 'Compleat Angler' referred to the broadsides he saw on the tavern walls as 'Country Songs'. The whole process of singers learning from print is a complex one - in our experience, the indications are that songs learned from a printed source were often treated as sacrosanct and remained unchanged, just for starters. Unsubstantiated definitive statements are little more than blind alleys that are quite likely to be replaced by other unsubstantiated blind alleys in the future. "I've looked through Jim Carroll's posts and I'm still trying to understand that 'process' fully" Me too - it's what we're all trying to arrive at. We can only pick our way through every scrap of what little we know of the song tradition, neglecting or 'explaining away' nothing (a tendency here and elsewhere). I'm no great fan of '54' as it stands at present, but I do think we need some sort of a definition that will allow us to communicate with kindred souls rather than squabbling uselessly and making threads like this an "Oh no - not another sodding "What is folksong" thread" Steve; I've never had a problem with the 'known author' inclusion idea, and I don't think anybody has made much of an issue of it for a long time, if they ever did. The Irish, particularly Irish language song tradition has such pieces in spades. If, as you say, "you would like clarification..... was dropped later" you have no grounds for saying "but even the 1954 definition has been discredited in academic circles" - exactly the type of definitive statement that creates more heat than light - I expect a hundred lines by the end of the day, "I must not...."! Nor do I believe that age has too much to do with whether a song is 'folk' or 'traditional'. We recorded many songs, particularly from Travellers, which must have been recently made, certainly well within the lifetimes of the singers (though I have to say that a common factor running through most of them was that their makers were almost exclusively 'anon') As I've said, it has more to do with the progress of a song rather than where it came from Is Johnny B Goode a folksong? Don't see any argument here that shows it to be anything but an oft performed pop song - once again a confusing of 'tradition' and 'repetition'. Try telling the Chuck Berry holdings that it's in the public domain and see how far that gets you. Jim Carroll