glueman - let's take some examples. I learned the song "Fare thee well my dearest dear" from a version recorded by Shirley Collins. Shirley Collins learned it from a version written down by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and he learned it from somebody who sang it to him, in 1904. What's recognisably the same song, with variations, can be found on broadsides dating back to the seventeenth century. Obviously somebody wrote it - I don't think anyone here's claiming that traditional songs emerge fully-formed from the collective unconscious. What's important is that, some time in the eighteenth century, that song entered the oral tradition, and it was still being passed along orally when Vaughan Williams turned up with his notebook.

You can do something similar with a lot of traditional songs. "Pleasant and delightful" comes off a nineteenth-century broadside; "Sam Hall" was a music hall turn; "Rosebud in June" was written for a play (it was a show tune, in other words). Old pop songs, really - not chthonic outbreathings of the soul of the people. But they're still folk - it's how they've reached us that makes the difference. This is why Bert Lloyd cared enough to fake the attribution for "Reynardine" and "The recruited collier", and also why many people care that he did this.

But "Streets of London", say, isn't a folk song and never will be. The problem is that there's a single, readily-available answer to the question: "what should that sound like?" We know the right melody, the right chords and the right words, and if we want to know how it all fits together we can listen to the writer singing it. That's a huge change from the conditions that existed as recently as a hundred years ago. Oral transmission, as a primary route for handing songs along, is essentially dead; the universal availability of recorded and broadcast music killed it. Oral transmission within the community of folkies goes on to a small extent, but that's not a community so much as an optional, part-time network that's selected itself around a specialist activity. It's a fantastic activity and an important network, but it's not a community: we are not the folk.