@ Jag: Sorry to keep harping back to the first page of "Some Conclusions". In the second paragraph of the book Sharp says "we must look to the musical utterances of those who were least affected by extraneous educational influences" (my emphasis).

I cannot see why you are apologising. I cannot speak for everybody but I can say that I have enjoyed your contributions to the discussion.

My contribution here might be that Sharp is hoping to get the remains of his romantically viewed 'pure' peasantry who would have been wholly untouched: I think discussions of the usage of the term peasant (while valid and in the case of Gammon and Knevett if not that of Bearman relatively convincing) turns us away from Sharp's (romantic) belief in this racial/national illiterate, untrained person whose intellect is formed solely by the ups and downs of life and who he imagines in what seems to me to be a romantic evidence-free way influenced by Child and Gummere to have originated the songs he was collecting, or the ones he chose not to reject for his own reasons. For plainly, whatever his motives, and, even if we reject Harkers' class-based analysis of why he did this, Child was, in my view 'mediating'.

Please don't be apologising