My last post was just supposed to be a starter. Keep kicking in the comments with additions or objections.

I think the songs would have to be learned from another traditional singer, and ideally should be 60 years or more from any printed source.

Back up to Alice's posting of Herbert Hughes comments. It seems there are two ways to look at 'correct traditional tune'. By definition a traditional tune is a 'correct' traditional tune. There are big problems in correctly noting them down with all the timing variations and ornamentations of a tune that a traditional singer uses, and folklorists have written articles on this. I am not about junk all tunes that aren't taken from hi-fi recordings of traditional singers. We wouldn't have many left.

I say hi-fi here for a reason. The 'Grieg-Duncan Folk Song Collection' is now complete in 7 volumes as to the texts and tunes, 1515 different songs. A few years after Greig and Duncan had collected these songs an American by the name of Carpenter went to the British Isles, and recorded quite a few of these songs from the singers that had supplied the versions in the Greig and Duncan collections. This was done on an early wire recorder, and the results are terrible by modern standards. [Original and taped copies in Library of Congress and copy at Ralph Vaughn Williams Memorial Library of EFDSS] The wire speed varied considerably and noise is big. It's hard (impossible for me on a few songs) to understand the words in the verses, and I don't know how one would note the tunes. [Audio specialists know how, by Fourier transform methods, to compensate to some extent for the variable wire speed and do frequency domain filtering out of much of the noise. The cost to do this is at present prohibative to have done professionally, and it's maybe now just possible for a talented computer jock to do some of it on a personal computer with enough extra software and hardware for digitizing long files (hi-fi .WAV files for about 3 to 4 minutes duration) and with Fourier transform programs that can access extended or expanded menmory.]