If this thread is to be of any use at all, it needs to be about Walter Pardon and not descend into trolling, personal abuse and over-reaction carried over from previous threads. I'd also say to Jim that, as far as I've understood, only the OP has made negative comments about his singing, and most other posters have praised it.

Like Howard Jones, whose contributions contain a lot of good sense, I'm interested in the OP's motive in opening the discussion. Putting all our present knowledge of Walter Pardon's repertoire, singing style, life experiences etc. in one place would be no bad thing. However, when the argument from the outset appears to be that everything we thought we knew is thrown into question by the (undefined) ideology and bias of those who met and recorded WP, I begin to suspect an agenda. Dave Harker's thesis in 'Fakesong' was that all previous scholarship was part of an overarching conspiracy to tell lies about working-class culture, and there seem to be echoes of that here.

Going back to the original and subsequent posts by Pseudonymous, there's a rather odd obsession with the possible influence of recordings on WP's singing style. It's not out of the question, but the evidence cited is misrepresented, for example:

Another interesting comment is one made by Roly Brown http://www.mustrad.org.uk/reviews/pardon1.htm (accessed 5/11/2019) to the effect that nobody has considered the possible links between Pardon’s work and his collection of 78 rpm records. My thought here is that the last thing that the folklore establishment would be interested in doing is comparing the singing style on these 78 rms with Pardon’s own. Some of the songs are now digitally available, and there seems to me to be very strong similarities, in, for example, some of the trills Pardon uses from time to time.

What Roly Brown is actually saying is that the booklet notes to the 'Put a Bit Of Powder' CD include a list of WP's 78 collection, but do not directly compare that repertoire with WP's own. He is clearly not talking about singing style. As far as the repertoire goes Brown finds the overlap 'negligible' and the list of 78s 'somewhat gratuitous'. There is no cover-up here. What, in any case, is 'the folklore establishment'? Is Roly Brown to be considered part of it and, if not, why not? What grounds are there for claiming that said 'establishment' would have been anything other than intrigued to find a traditional singer's style to have been influenced by commercial recordings? The same review states that 'Walter rarely decorates', and there is no mention of 'trills' - I never detected any and nor, apparently, did Nick Dow.

Here's another odd remark that seeks somehow to undermine WP's status:

"Somewhere else it is said that Pardon started writing songs down after Billy died. But if so, who is to say where he found the words he wrote down?"

The suggestion here seems to be that WP probably obtained his texts from print, recordings, or possibly even made them up himself. It ignores the most likely explanation, which is that he simply remembered them. I can recall many song lyrics I heard regularly as a child, even ones I've never heard (or sung myself) since. There's no shortage of examples of traditional singers remembering lengthy ballads heard in their youth.

And here's an agenda-driven claim:

"A person who, early after his discovery, was denying singing folk songs cannot have spent so much time surrounded by the ideologues of the revival without picking up on their attitudes, without understanding, in a sense, what they want from him and the language in which they discuss song. The 'data' on Pardon as a traditional singer supposedly produced by so many interviews is hopeless polluted by all this, not to mention the leading questions that his interviewers appear to have been so fond of using."

No examples are cited of 'leading questions', but the assumption in this (to me as well as Jim Carroll) patronising and rather offensive statement is that Walter Pardon was a suggestible old man, and we can safely discount the opinions he expressed because they've been planted in his silly head by the dreaded 'folklore establishment'. Never mind that he, by all accounts, was an intelligent man with strong and articulate views of his own. As I said elsewhere, the whole point of trying to learn WP's opinions about the songs was that so few song collectors of an earlier era bothered to do this kind of thing. Most interested parties would celebrate the approach, rather than attempt to undermine it. Jim Carroll's account is that WP maintained a distinction between the older songs in his repertoire and the Music Hall material, as did certain other traditional singers. He also made a clear association between melodies in the non-major modes (melodeon bellows finish extended) and the antiquity of the song.

Here's another questionable point:

"He himself said he believed that his grandfather got them from broadsides. If that source doesn't count as Victorian popular music …."

Actually the OP's original description (on another thread) was 'Victorian pop songs', which was clearly pejorative. Even his diluted version is inaccurate, though. For a start, broadsides typically included no music. Secondly, as the Roly Brown review cited by the OP makes clear, the broadside repertoire we are talking about here 'entered the domain of singers [from] the late eighteenth century up to and including the biggest surge of broadside production during the 1830s and 1840s'. Victoria ascended to the throne in 1737. No doubt many of the same broadside texts were still available when WP's grandfather was a young man (though this would not explain where he got the tunes), but that does not make them cultural products of the Victorian era.

Lastly, Pseudonymous really needs to get to grips with what 'tradition' means in this context. It's about songs being passed on between generations and communities - nothing to do with anonymity, antiquity or performance style. And it's usage has nothing to do with Marxism.

I'm glad Mike Yates has joined the discussion, that makes two contributors who know more about Walter Pardon than most.