"I'm sorry Ron but you really have lost me. You seem to be contradicting the opposite of what I have said."

You said:

"Most of the people round here who sing their songs learnt them directly, not from books or recordings."

The point I was trying to make is that in this day and age, why not learn from books or recordings?   IF recordings were available, and if access to larger libraries were available, wouldn't that change the "oral" process?   Are we basing our collecting on what was done 100 years ago instead of considering that modern advances have changed the process, but that the process still exists because of these advances?   

I was throwing this out to the group - going back to someone elses example of an "unrecorded" Child ballad, why is that more valuable than a Music Hall song?