"by calling him a "hack"."
The common name for broadside sellers - you mean
I am not referring to one individual writer - not have I ever implied that no songs produced on the broadside presses were hacks
This asise, you put the situation in a nutshell Jack with your phrase "the first known version" - does that mean there were no previous versions?
Ay - there's the rub.
"Braes of Balquidder" is an interesting example - the MacPeake's claimed ownership of the song and said it originated with their family, they believed it so strongly that they took the case to court.
I'm not suggesting for one moment they were right, but it is an indication that these songs were claimed
This is one description of the tangled history of the song (which I always attributed to Tannehill)

"Wild Mountain Thyme" (also known as "Purple Heather" and "Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?") is a Scottish folk song that was collected by Francis McPeake 1st, who wrote the song himself for his wife. The McPeake family claim recognition for the writing of the song. Francis McPeake is a member of a well known musical family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The lyrics and melody are a variant of the song "The Braes of Balquhither" by Scottish poet Robert Tannahill (1774–1810), a contemporary of Robert Burns. Tannahill's original song, first published in Robert Archibald Smith's Scottish Minstrel (1821–24), is about the hills (braes) around Balquhidder near Lochearnhead. Like Burns, Tannahill collected and adapted traditional songs, and "The Braes of Balquhither" may have been based on the traditional song "The Braes o' Bowhether"."
The implication here is that it was adapted from the oral tradition and passed though numerous adaptations.
Your Jacobite poet takes us back to Steve Gardhams original reaction to the entire repertoire from 'Frog and the Mouse' to a song about an Irishman killed in the Birmingham Blitz during W.W.2. - Steve has now adapted his argument to those song made in the latter half of the 19th century
What are we talking about here - all the repertoire or Just Steve's adaptation.?

Vic
If you want firm evidence there isn't a shred of it either way, so all the modern scientific methods have nothing to work on apart from tracing first printed versions unless you have any way of showing these to be the first, first printing means nothing whatever.
That the broadside writers were poor poets is beyond question - I assume that Ashton, Ensworth, Hindley, et-al chose to fill their collections with the best current examples - the common feature of all these collections is that they are overwhelmingly clumsily unsingable doggerel - that's why their creatrs were referred to as hacks(said to be adapted in the 18th century the description of the overworked 'hackney carriage' - "tired, overused, unoriginal, trite; (similar to jaded and nag)
(Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins)
Child put this somewhat more succinctly and less diplomatically when he described the outpourings of these people as "veritable dunghills"

Were such writers capable of making our folk songs ?
Not in my opinion, they weren't

One of the features of writers writing on subjects outside their own experience is to produce pastiche - plenty of examples in the broadsides and from the songs of the stage and pleasure gardens - Dibden made his name producing such dross.
Victorian parlour ballads, the Tavern songs listed in the diaries of Charles Rice (1840/50), music hall compositions and the sentimental syrup that has now been given Roud numbers are more of the same.
Comparing these with our folk songs is the only "evidence" we have - circumstantial but far lass so than early published dates.

Adaptation by the oral tradition has been put forward as an explanation/excuse, bu even that is a double edged argument
If the people were capable turning sows ears into silk purses, is that not evidence that they possessed poetic skills capable of making songs?
The subject matter, the familiarity with the vernacular, the apparent 'insider-knowledge' the adversarial sympathies for the characters and their travails... all further circumstantial evidence in favour of common composition.
As far as I am concerned, if working people were capable of making their songs (some of you have paid lip-service for them being able to) then they probably did.

We haven't even begun to tackle th complicated and often contradictory subject of literacy and the attitude to it.

The Irish rural poor apparently produced many hundreds of songs describing their lives, emotions and aspirations - in the worst of circumstances
What was wrong with their English and Scots counterparts that they didn't do the same?

It seems to be very much a case of some people here being reluctant to believe they did - nothing more
Enough - off to bed
Jim Carroll