You are still making crass, unsubstantiated statements and your responses are still as evasive as they were in the beginning.

The point I was making is that the songs themselves are evidence of them having been composed. Where else did they originate? Just as dry-stone walls don't build themselves, songs don't write themselves, and my suggestion is that they were written by people who were, in effect, masters of the idiom in which they were working. That their names haven't survived is hardly surprising - and even if they had survived, it's unlikely that source-singers would have divulged them on account of the attention they were getting from the agenda-driven collectors who wouldn't have been interested if a song was the work of a known composer thus indicating that their precious Oral Tradition wasn't quite what their faith told them it was. Never bite the hand that feeds you; although Disney's men once drove lemmings over a cliff edge to prove a myth too...

I've worked with traditional storytellers who were very much story-makers and freely admitted to it, albeit rather sorrowfully, in their cups, and well off the record, though it always seemed pretty obvious to me & I applauded them for it. A lot of traditional songs have known composers; my favourite of all is McGinties Meal & Ale, George Bruce Thompson's masterpiece which has found its way into The Tradition with numerous variations on the original, perhaps most notably by Davie Stewart, but Andy Stewart did a cracking version too. I would also argue that the songs of Tommy Armstrong are similarly idiomatically traditional & in his use of traditional melodies & structures that shaped the canny knack of his craft he displays the same mastery we see in the anonymous songs.

A tradition is not the songs themselves, rather it's creative idiom in which the songs were made, and re-made, as they are created, learned, half-forgotten, and re-imagined. In a non-literate culture this becomes all the more evident, but we see the same thing today as novels are made into films which are remade as other films, or else re-told as stories, comics, graphic-novels; we see the same thing in popular music too. In their pre-tech habitat these old songs existed in an evident fluidity which is pretty much the essence of what creative music is - such things exist in a state of flux by default, and, accordingly traditions evolve and the material likewise. This is no different from any other music; it is what music is; all music is thus Traditional in the sense of the word as used by the ICTM which embraces not only folk, but popular, urban and classical musics too. I would also argue that this makes more sense of what the Oral Tradition is, than the romantic assumption of a volkish collectivity, which is to fail to see the creativity of the working-class men and women who were The Tradition, a creativity which was all but denied them by a revival that cherished the anonymous as the authentic.   

And when did I ever say I didn't believe in research? You keep throwing this at me, but a source would be nice so I might give it some sort of context - something that your increasingly reactive side-swiping seems entirely devoid of. I can assure you all my conclusions (as far as they are conclusions, given the nature of the subject matter) are the result of my ongoing researches into traditional idioms of folk song & folk tale which I take very seriously indeed. And I have heard your recordings; you sent me a tape once (misplaced shortly afterwards in our move but it will turn up) and I note your contributions to VOTP etc. My heresy is simply that on such sound foundations I dare to interpret that material differently from the tattered anachronistic shibboleths of a fast-fading Folk Revival which has failed to establish the cultural significance of that which ought to be appreciated as the national cultural treasure but which is, largely thanks to said revival and the attitudes therein, a national embarrassment.

If only John England had been singing Tit-Willow on that fateful day back in 1903 how different things might have been...

S O'P - Heading North. I may be gone some time...