SOP, you refer to "a social condescension which saw these grubby rustics as passive carriers of a cultural phenomenon they couldn't possibly understand, rather than the active determinators of that phenomenon that they most surely were. Could, therefore, our entire concept of The Folk Process (and the 1954 Defination) have its roots in the sloppy, selective & agenda driven field-work on the part of the early collectors who saw the songs as being of greater significance than their lowly, ill-educated singers?"

Surely Sharp came to the opposite conclusions - he says that "folk songs originated among those who play and sing it; that it is the product of the folk muse, and that neither the skilled musician nor his compositions have inspired its creation". He goes on to argue that songs which originate from an individual are then shaped by the community. Sharp's (admittedly romantic) view of the primitive peasant untouched by outside influences was not to deny their creativity, rather to say that they possessed a particular kind of creativity which truly expressed their inherent native culture without having been contaminated by other ideas.

Sharp's language can appear patronising to modern ears, and ideas about the original sources of folk songs have moved on. It is also true that his fieldwork was selective by modern standards, and he had an agenda. However his "Conclusions" were centred around the idea of these "grubby rustics" creating and developing their songs, rather than being mere passive carriers of them.