"Where in the sainted folk process is origination?"

This is a serious question and deserves serious thought. Ballad scholars have agonized over it for decades, and still no-one really knows. The best current guess (this from a friend of mine who knows way more about it than I do) is that the ballad form originated in 'metrical romances' (things like 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'), i.e. pieces composed by highly literate specialists for reading and recitation. Some of these may have had their basis in folk tales - as do many of the Child ballads. At some point the metrical romances acquired melodies (from where, we know not), and the sung ballad was born.

If this theory is correct, then already the compositional process is blurred. No one person sat down and composed lyrics and tune together. Even in the case of songs from the Victorian period, where a particular broadside copy may be taken as the 'original' we still have to speculate as to where the tune(s) came from, since most broadsides didn't include or specify one.

But the bigger point is that, even if we could pinpoint the original sixteenth or seventeenth-century copy of, say, 'The Elfin Knight', and find a name for its composer, we would still be confronted by scores of different versions of the ballad collected in widely scattered locations, stamped with the same basic template but departing in all kinds of exotic directions both musically and textually.

Ballads known by the name 'Scarborough Fair' in Yorkshire, 'The Elphin Knight' in Aberdeenshire, 'The Cambric Shirt' in the coalmines of Kentucky, and 'Hey Ho Sing Ivy' in Sussex are at once the same song and completely different songs. Even if there were a single originator (an unlikely proposition in the first place), the spawn of the old ballad has evolved into countless new and diverse species. The tweaking is what it's all about - just as life on Earth is about Natural Selection, and not a single Creator.

As Frank Hamilton said above:
"That's what makes it folk.
People change it."