Our literature never questioned that the people created the folk songs
Child never dealt with folk song in general and was working from printed copies, some of which, he conceded might have been literary creations
Collectors warned against interfering with what 'the peasantry' had passed on
Folk songs contain chunks of social history, as you say - what makes them important is that much of the history they contain is not available elsewhere
You can go to military records to found out how The Battle of the Nile was fought, but you have to go to the songs to find out how it felt for a ploughman to be ripped out of his roots and sent off to fight in Africa

The difference between broadside compositions and the folksongs is not similar to that of an assembly line worker helping churn of cheap ornaments for the tourists and a whalerman carving a piece of scrimshaw - one leaves a piece of himself in his creation, the other doesn't
The pressure to produce the broadsides is, I have no doubt, the reason why so many of then were unsingable
An unsingable song is simply that - unsingable - that is certainly not and aesthetic judgement; in my case if is the view of a singer who has searched the collections searching for songs
I have no idea if you are a singer - I don't even know who you are or what your involvement is
I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve

"Using the mid twentieth-century term 'pop song' in this context is, for me, an unhelpful anachronism. "
I din't introduce it into this argument - one of the leading 'print origin' advocates did when he said these songs were made for money - somewhat gleefully, I seem to remember

If I have spent thirty years placing these songs into a social context and treating them as unique and am suddenly told that they were the products of desk-bound urban hacks producing them at a rate of knots I have been wasting my time - I can take comfort from the fact that so were the rest of my generation of folk song enthusiasts
I can also take comfort from the fact that this claim doesn't hold water

A semi- literate (if that) cottage dweller buying songs and carrying them home to his ill-lit cottage to learn, adapt and lovingly remake so he or she can then turn them into the gems they are - I don't think so really
It neither makes practical nor cultural sense
If we've found out anything in the last four decades it has been that people did make songs and they could make songs, my the many hundreds
THe singers called their songs their own, they identified with them socially, personally and geographically
They may have sung all different genres of songs but they discriminate between the different genres
The actually visualised their folk songs and placed them in familiar surroundings

All this, for me, identifies these songs as being what they have always been regarded as (up to now) - "the songs" or "the voice of the people"
It will take me a lot more than earliest printed dates to show me otherwise
Jim