First Richard
The '54 definition was an attempt to analyse the uniqueness of folk song - what made it different from other genres of song
It wasn't a rule book - it was a rough guide - it was a compromise anyway because it was arrived at by an international team to incorporate the national differences.
I'm not for one minute suggesting this is what you are doing here, but whenever people wish to avoid definition, they always quote the flawed '54 as if those of us who believe there to be no great problem are adherents to it.
I seldom is ever use the definition because, as far as I am concerned, it's the uniqueness and, in my opinion, the common origin of folk song which is important
I certainly have never attempted to exclude commercially produced material - I have fully accepted that broadsides have been part of the oral tradition.
My point is and remains that if, as Steve Gardham (and to an extent Roud), has stated, that the mkeup of our folk repertoire was a two way street broadsides feeding into the tradition and the tradition providing material for the presses, why the hell are we discussing such high percentages when - here at least, people have accepted that rural dwellers were capable of making songs?
'Ordinary' people, rural and urban, have made songs since childhood days; we know from the first reported sighting of cattlemen singing, that the oral tradition predated literacy by at least one thousand years.
What has been suddenly discovered to question that fact?
Did printed songs stand a better chance of surviving in a society that was new to literacy, if it existed at all?
When Victoria came to the throne one third of the English population could be described as being in some way literate, in the countryside, literacy hardly existed among the rural workers
The songs, particularly the ballads, thrived in totally non-literate societies - the Travellers were still proving to be the greatest carriers of ballads right into the latter half f the twentieth century - The Maid and the Palmer, probably the finest version of Young Hunting recorded from an illiterate wood-seller, a unique Clare version of William and Margaret (Child 74) learned from an alcoholic Travelling woman, a full version of Lamkin, two versions of Lord Gregory learned from one illiterate man.....
Go look at the Scots Traveller repertoire to see how many ballads survived thare
It is facile to the point of being ludicrous to suggest that these were introduced into the communities via the printed word and the purchaser sought out a local reader in order to learn them.
Sterve Roud's and Gardham's claims appear to be based on how many songs appeared on the broadsides
Unless that can show there to have been no oral versions prior to the printed versions, they really do have no case.
Your "some of each" dodges the question of how many are being claimed here
How do you feel about 95 to 100% - they are the figures we need to be discussing
Nobody is arguing that some didn't start on the presses - I said so right at the beginning of these arguments and have always accepted it
Jim Carroll