While official accounts of battles are made (as I said earlier) on the spot by literate educated officers (and in the last 150 years by journalists), "historical" folk songs are made by less literate, less educated ordinary mean and women, often after the event, and from memory. Sometimes they're made from handed-down stories from parents, grandparents or others; Eric Bogle wasn't arund in the First World War, for instance.

Subsequent generations may (will!) change the sense or the emphasis of a song, or even attach it to a different event. In "Greenland whale fishery", the lines "To lose that whale," our captain cried, "it grieves my heart full sore sore,/But, oh, the losing of those five brave men,/It grieves me ten times more" got turned around i the fifties, to make the captain into a wicked profit-oriented capitalist; that refelcted the spirit of the times, but was "historically" incorrect. We can never be sure how much an old orally-transmitted song has changed since its first creation, nor how "accurate" it was to begin with.

A folk songs is a historical document, like a period artefacts=; it shows us something of what life was like at a particular time and place in society (if you can pin it down closely enought!).

Steve