"The fact that a song was collected from an illiterate in the late 20th century is no evidence at all that it was handed down orally for centuries."
Who's talking about the late 20th Century Jack - the oral versions of these songs date fack a century or so earlier than that.
The ones I'm working on now date back to the years following the Irish famine - Burns was collecting songs form Scots peasants earlier than that
Up to the middle of the 19th century literacy was an largely an urban phenomenon and the percentage of people who could read was fairly small
I find the idea of a farmworker going along to the local literate and asking him to interpret the printed words of a song rather.... well!
Travellers were overwhelmingly non-literate and largely outsiders yet they were the most important carriers of our biggest ballads
THe tunes were largely randomly chosen - few ready available printed versions came with tunes
As far as I can make out, the songs that were taken from print (we hae no idea how many were) were given tunes already in use

When push comes to shove, we have no idea who made our folk songs and never will
Our knowledge of the oral tradition dates back only as far as the work done by Sharp and his team, and that is both sparse and gathered at a time when the tradition was being remembered or iften reported from an earlier generation rather than taken down as a living art form
As things stand, we have only common sense as a guide as to who made our folk songs   
It's common sense to me that, rather than the urban, desk-bound hacks (poor poets) working under conveyor-belt conditions having made them, it is far more likely to have been the soldiers, sailors, farm-workers.... rural poor in general that make up the subjects of the songs who were the most likely authors
It took geniuses like Steinbeck, Sinclair and Noonan (Tressell) to write convincing accounts about working life - the hacks with their massed volumes of unsingable songs were as far from that as you could possibly get
If you accept that 'ordinary' people were capable of having made the songs, then you have to concede that they have a far more convincing claim than anybody else

I was extremely patronisingly described as "starry eyed when I quoted MacColl's last moving statement at the end of 'The Song Carriers' series

"Well, there they are, the songs of our people. Some of them have been centuries in the making, some of them undoubtedly were born on the broadside presses. Some have the marvellous perfection of stones shaped by the sea's movement. Others are as brash as a cup-final crowd. They were made by professional bards and by unknown poets at the plough-stilts and the handloom. They are tender, harsh,, passionate, ironical, simple, profound.... as varied, indeed, as the landscape of this island.
We are indebted to the Harry Coxes and Phil Tanners, to Colm Keane and Maggie MaccDonagh, to Belle Stewart and Jessie Murray and to all the sweet and raucous unknown singers who have helped to carry our people's songs across the centuries."

MacColl's view was that of virtually all the folk song scholars, so presumably they were all "starry eyed" too
The accusation was aimed at the entire folk repertoire, from 'Frog and the Mouse' to a Second World War song - it has since been adapted to include only the songs being collected from a dying tradition - doesn't leave me with a great deal of confidence in the accuser, I'm afraid.
MacColl's summing up has been verified for me in thirty odd years field work of interviewing singers who lived through oral singing traditions - I'm happy to continue to accept it until a more rational one is produced
Jim