The point, again, is that if you are looking for national origins of songs, there is a nationalist politics which not only informs that search, but defines it.

There are imbedded political agendas and assumptions inherent in the search for "origins" of folk songs by nation. The roots are in the European movement known as romantic nationalism, which is where the origins of what we now refer to as "folklore" and "antiquities" and "anthropology" and "archaeology" lie. In the very recent past, when Europe was constructing the modern nation-state. The nationalist study of folk song was part and parcel of that process, and while that now antiquated model of enquiry still drives the study of much folk song in Ireland and Britain's academies of higher learning, it is considered outdated in the US especially, because of it's racialist and nationalist assumptions and essentializing.