There's nothing 'romantic' about the stress on oral transmission and adoption of songs by ordinary people, BH - that's a bit like saying that you can learn karate from a book, and learning with a sensei is an old-fashioned and 'romantic' notion.

Oral transmission of songs sung by ordinary people is - or was - a distinct social process. Traditional songs are - by and large - songs that have come out of that process.

Society changes; nobody's going to walk five miles into town if they can get the bus. The 'folk process' started to die out, in Britain at least, as soon as the mechanical reproduction of music reached a mass level, and now it's pretty much extinct.

It strikes me that your argument is the romantic one - you're starting from the position that the folk process must still be alive and fitting the evidence to that conclusion. When Jim draws a line under the folk process - it flourished in certain conditions, those conditions aren't there any more, the folk process has more or less died out - he's being a hard-headed realist.