Let's keep this straight though--the imperial road to cultural colonisation was built by the British. A tremendous amount of cultural knowledge had already been destroyed and lost before the Americans followed the Brits down the cultural colonisation road.

IMO, most searches for "origins", especially here in Mudcat, is done to prove that a song "belongs" to one cultural group (like the English) by disproving the cultural claims another cultural group (like the Scots or the Irish) has to the song or the tune.

It's a turf war, in other words, and not at all productive. While the story surrounding the song is something I often find interesting, I rarely care about the origins of tunes and songs where the composer isn't known. IMO, people want to know about the origins to lay claim to the thing--just as true with trad material as it is with stuff composed and copyrighted today.