If you think that's the case, you really haven't understood what we're talking about.

If that's the case, Pip - I've been labouring under a similar delusion for the last 35 years, which isn't entirely inconceivable I grant you. I think Glueman's bang on the nail there: By all means fetishise transference but 'anon' does not only mean unknown in the traditional context. Indeed, there is a lot of extra baggage carried by Anon or Traditional right up to the point where, as both yourself and Jim have suggested, the conditions for such transference, if it happened at all (which I personally don't believe it did) no longer exist!

I was singing one of Tommy Armstrong's songs recently - The Marla Hill Ducks - a true story, written in dialect to the traditional Northumbrian melody of The Wild Hills o' Wannies. Here was a master versifier writing well within a tradition of narrative folk song; his songs haven't been transferred via any sort of Folk Process, rather they have remained as he wrote them. In my heart, and the hearts of many, they are Traditional Songs, written a known individual and sung by many who regard him with considerable awe. I would hazard a guess that all the traditional songs we know are the work of similar individual genii; master craftsmen, sadly anonymous if only because the collectors had a particular point to prove regarding the communal nature of The Tradition.