"I wonder how much of the background information associated with the older collections is essential packaging ("tell us something about this song") and marketing hype ("Ancient..., Relics of...") rather than deeply meaningful theorising."

This is an interesting point. I referred a while ago to a PhD by Matthew Ord which went into some of these issues in respect of revivalist materials. The practice of producing 'liner notes' is one that caught my attention, not least because a great many of these appear to have been flawed. Ord goes beyond written texts to look at 'multimodal' semiotic practices. By this he means that images, text and sound work together to create a picture. It was a University of Newcastle thesis and you will find it by googling.

@ Jag@ I respect your point of view and the civility with which you express your ideas, but I wonder whether finding a 'simple' view of Sharp's piece risks misrepresenting it.

@ Jim: I wrote 'it is the idea that folk song was written by the lowest class that I cannot agree with' in the context of the discussion of Sharp. To clarify my point: I do not deny that anybody can make up a song, and I never have. The point I was making but probably did not express well enough was that I think it is an oversimplification of Sharp to say that he believed that the old English songs he was collecting had been produced by the lowest social stratum, and that his discussion of their more broad racial origin would make this view illogical if he did hold it.

However, I would tend to agree with Bert Lloyd that the idea of a purely oral tradition stretching back over centuries is a non-starter.