"last week I looked at one and found that you were trying to mislead us"
We spent over twenty years recording a Traveller singer/storyteller/lore-bearer from County Kerry, in the South West of Ireland.
As a young man he, along with his mother, was involved in 'ballad' selling - the last knockings of the broadside trade in Ireland, which lasted up to the 1950s.
Mikeen could struggle a little with reading but His mother was totally non-literate.
He described how they would go into a printers and recite the words of his father's songs over counter, who would then make ballad sheets from them, to be sold around the fairs and markets of South West Munster.
Whatever state the songs left their source (Mikeen's father, in this case) the somewhat haphazard process of putting them into print certainly didn't guarantee them being passed on intact.
Non literate Travellers have been one of the major passers on of traditional songs throughout twentieth century Ireland, their taste for a "good story" has been the saviour of many of the rarest Child ballads - this is why I'm so insistent that the connection between literacy and traditional song is not as straightforward as some people seem to think it is.
If you add to this the information we have been given from many settled singers and their mistrust of the printed word, the whole process really is a minefield.
Jim Carroll