>> For folk believers The Process is an irreducible creed <<

Not true. For many years there's been an acceptance of the role of printed sources, for example, in disseminating, and quite probably originating, songs. I remember a well-informed poster on another thread estimating that most of the folksongs originating during the 18th and 19th centuries were the work of a couple of a couple of dozen broadside hacks (the older ballads are a much more complicated story, as I've explained already). See below for details of an event which I bet will shed much light on this.

There's plenty of discussion happening on the relative importance of textual evolution through oral process, versus stasis through print. The aforementioned Harry Cox liner notes (pleased to see another couple of sales clocked up here!) says of the song 'Colin and Pheobe' - originally a stage piece dating from 1755 - "the only real differences between traditional versions and the original text is that certain stilted phrases have been translated into more everyday language". Some songs were 'processed' only to a limited degree, others much more so. My musical compadre Gordon Tyrrall wrote an interesting dissertation comparing broadside texts with the corresponding songs from tradition, and examining the 'humanising' effect of oral processing on stodgy, wordy originals.

There's another discussion to be had about the extent to which broadside composers appropriated material from oral tradition and recycled it, sometimes adding their own clumsy moralising codas along the way. And still another discussion as to where the tunes came from - they weren't usually specified on broadsides and can vary dramatically between alternative collected versions.

The argument is highly nuanced. Unfortunately it's been turned into a shouting match on this and other threads by nonsensical and deliberately confrontational statements like "the tradition never existed" and "folk process is a myth".

In the meantime, here's some proper research you can all share in - I can tell you that the debate has begun even before the meeting takes place....

Where Did the Oral Tradition Get its Songs?
An informal seminar on the printed sources of traditional and popular song in
Britain from the 18th to 20th century. Featuring broadsides, chapbooks, garlands,
songsters, sheet music, and other printed materials from bygone ages.
Presented by Steve Roud, Roy Palmer and Steve Gardham, with plenty of original
examples on display
Jointly organised by the Traditional Song Forum and the English Folk Dance & Song
Society
Date: Saturday 10th October 2009; 1.30 – 5.00 pm
Venue: Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regents Park Road, London NW1 7AY (Tel. 0207 485
2206)
Open to all: TSF & EFDSS members free. Visitors £5
The featured items will be on display for inspection from 12 noon
Further details contact Steve Roud on sroud@btinternet.com.

[Synopsis]
In the pre-radio and pre-gramophone days before the turn of the twentieth century,
there were only two ways to learn a song – from hearing someone sing or recite it,
or from a written or printed source.
When the great folksong collectors of the Victorian and Edwardian era started
publishing the songs they had noted from the lips of elderly village singers, they
naturally stressed the role which the Oral Tradition had played in the dissemination
and preservation of traditional song, but they downplayed the equally important
part played by commercially printed materials.
But printers and publishers had long realised that one of the things that the public
wanted was songs, and that they would pay good money to get them. From the
sixteenth century onwards, a vigorous industry existed to cater for this public
demand, which aimed to provide something for every taste, and every pocket.
Broadsides – crudely printed single sheets with the words of a song or two, often
decorated by a woodcut which had only a vague connection with the text – were
printed and sold in huge numbers in city streets and at country fairs. They were
extremely cheap, and an account of a good murder could sell hundreds of thousands
of copies.

There were also chapbooks – little 8-page booklets, often called Garlands – and
songsters, which were slightly more ambitious but still paper-covered and relatively
cheaply printed. There were little toy-books, miniature collections of songs and
nursery rhymes, aimed at children. Further up the social scale, and therefore costing
a lot more, there was a huge trade in sheet music, aimed at the piano-playing,
parlour-singing middle classes, and a wide range of hardback, properly printed songbooks,
with tasteful engravings rather than crude woodcuts. Some publications
concentrated on sentimental songs, others on comic or patriotic themes, and so on.
Many places of entertainment also catered for the public demand for songs. Song
and supper rooms, glee clubs, pleasure gardens, pantomimes, minstrel shows,
musical interludes and farces on the stage, and eventually music halls and variety
theatres, all issued song sheets, booklets or books of the songs they featured. A wide
variety of social clubs and trade societies issued their own song-books, and religious
bodies were formed to publish uplifting songs to counter what they saw as the
morally-damaging effects of popular culture.
So there was no shortage of sources for those who wanted to learn songs, but there
were barriers. If you were a working-class person, for example, could you read?
Could you afford the price of a hardback book? How did you get the tune if you
couldn't read music? If you lived in the country, how did the town-printed materials
get to you? And there are other questions – Were the same types of song included in
all these different formats, or was there any segregation? Were the songs featured
on sheet music, for example, the kind of things that the lower classes wanted to sing,
or were they perhaps too 'educated'? Were there 'hit songs' like today, or just a
mass of undifferentiated material?
In the session Where Did the Oral Tradition Get its Songs? we will be looking at
examples of many of the types of printed materials available to the 18th and 19th
century public, and discussing the part they played in the creation and perpetuation
of our folksong heritage.