A juicy topic, IMO. Establishing TPQ and TAQ should be a pleasant pastime for songs that have historical "artifacts" buried in them, such as references to penal colonies and battles. For the vast body of folk song without such datable items, or which never were printed in broadsides or slips or songsters, it seems that the task of dating would be akin to dating the artifacts of an archaeological site that had been dug up by a bucket loader, dumped into a truck and then driven to the archaeologist's lab.

Take sea chanteys, for example. Unless they descended from shore-side sources, such as broadsides, they didn't (with a few exceptions) appear in print anywhere until the late 1800s at the earliest, when the age of sail was already fading. So when Colcord and Hugill and Doerflinger started collecting them, there was very little evidence to use in dating them. For this type of folksong the best we can do is date the body of song from which they come.

I'm quite intrigued by the notion of a folksong forger, like the above-mentioned Mr. Collier. If there were money in it I'm sure we'd be seeing all sorts of fake murder ballads and transportation songs. I'm reminded of the rumor I heard that the well-known whaling song "The Bonnie Ship the Diamond" was collected under allegedly suspicious circumstances by A.L. Lloyd (or was it Ewan McColl?), and "that there's some as think 'e wrote it 'iself!"

Thanks for starting such an interesting thread, IanC.

Jerry