The fact that this massive repertoire of orally transmitted songs, stretching back for up to four centuries and across the English-speaking world (and beyond, if you take the ballads into consideration) is related by style, content and function indicates a common process of composition - a 'school' of songmaking.

In a nutshell, that's what I mean by master composers; masters in the sense of cultural genre and time-served craftsmanship.

The fact that none of these songmakers have been named makes it clear that they are a product of a 'folk process',

Their names don't come down to us because of various factors but we can be sure they had names, just as the brickies, chippies, plasters etc. who built my house had names. Just as the Hungarian village carpenter who made my Citera over 150 years ago had a name. They were creative human individuals, no different from any other creative human individuals. I see no evidence of a specific Folk Process any different from any other musical process - just one that has floundered somewhat via the secondary collected literary sources by which we have come to know it. What I do see plenty of evidence for is a tradition of stylistic song-making and transformation which indicates both the fluidity in which the songs existed in their natural habitat and the essentially improvised nature of song-making as an integral aspect of their performance. Once a song has been collected it is frozen at the point of its collection - it becomes a thing, a pinned butterfly removed from an ecological context that we don't fully understand. Consequently they are dealt with as cultural abstracts; the more remote they are, so the greater that abstraction invariably becomes. My point is, to call this a (or the) folk process is to perhaps misunderstand the nature of the songs in their pre-collected living form.

HOWEVER...

Looks like another thread has been ruined by Mudcat's Nannying Interference Police. I hereby register my personal outrage and disgust that ANYONE should be excluded from this discussion on any grounds whatsoever, least of all Glueman. Why do lines like It has come to my attention send shivers of revulsion down my spine?

Joe, for the sake of common decency get things in perspective - lift this inhumane and entirely unjustified ban and let this discussion proceed as it will.