because I don't know what other factors there are.

There are any amount of possible factors, Pip - not least the factor by which the songs come down to us - i.e. via the collectors, who invariably had a hand in things to a greater or lesser extent, with various peculiar agendas to prove in so doing. The tradition is one of a mastery of song-craft manifest in uncommon individual master ballad-mongers whose anonymity gives the illusion of a folk collectivity, but this is, I think, entirely misleading.   Worth a thought anyway, what? I don't think such songs could ever come into being via debasement; what we're seeing here is the product of a very deliberate and purposeful mastery. Sure debasement exists, as does faulty memory, which accounts for fragments and other such like dead-ends, but where a fragment is taken up and fleshed out; honed with resolute genius, then for sure you might well perceive collectivity, but all I see is people, doing what people have always done, just we don't know who they were.

Is this a bit like pressure waves travelling along a traffic jam? Or a Mexican Wave which is a similar phenomenon? We see the wave, rather than the people...

With respect of Folk Tales I've long been entranced by the notion that the syntactic structures of language are the psycho-biological wellsprings of narrative which is implicit in all art, from the most basic of sentences to the relative complexities of the sonata form. In storytelling with reception classes I've often found myself further enchanted by the sudden realisation that in a very real way the kids already know the story, which then becomes journey along a well-worn path deep into the synaptic forests of cognition itself*. So in this sense A Tradition is very much a phenomenon of human collectivity, although the process of composition remains something very different - and that takes singular genius, be it in the cunning of Butter and Cheese and All** or the music of John Coltrane. Human culture is collectivity expressed in terms of individual genius, something that our romantic Folklorists, Antiquarians and later left-wing Folk theorists were quite keen to deny, albeit for very different reasons***.

* I can't believe it either, but I'm afraid it's the sort of imagery we storytellers are prone to, especially still suffering from heat stroke...

** I know I keep banging on about this song but it's one of the ones that I recently re-learnt and in so doing entered into a very weird dialogue with the nature of the song itself which twisted up in my very dreams with vivid images both erotic & horrific, fighting me at every turn until at last it finally gave itself to me. Each time I sing it it becomes a vehicle for further musical improvisation as the images spin ever wilder in my brain. In this way the Folk Singer becomes a medium in a very singular seance indeed...

*** The former because they regarded all grubby rustics as being incapable of understanding the true significance of what they were doing and the latter because - er - much the same actually, hence the need for the guiding hand of the intelligentsia. I love the story of Alan Lomax first meeting Jimmy Miller and Albert Lancaster when they were giving a performance to the miners of Tow Law in an attempt to reintroduce them to their own folk songs. No doubt stuff like The Dirty Blackleg Miner which Bert had adapted specially for them from an American original.

*

Intelligent Design, eh?

Where there is design, there is intelligence. Otherwise, design is in the eye of the beholder, which is to say God did not create evolution, nor yet, for that matter, Folk Songs.