"Jim,I find I change things anyway,regardless of whether I learned a song orally,or from a printed source."
However we learn our songs, I wonder how far we would have got without The Penguin Book of English Folk Song or The Singing Island or Marrowbones, or any of the basic collections that helped by giving us a push-start all those years ago.
The sad thing for me is, at a time when there has never been so much material available the folk repertoire seems to have shrunk to almost nothing. I'm afraid I find very little to inspire me nowadays - certainly not on Utube.
As regards the tradition proper, your question of publication is a fascinating and far more complicated than it appears on the surface. For instance, it seems a contradiction that a non-literate group like the Travellers should have had such a strong influence on the Irish singing tradition through the printed word - ballad selling. The rarest, also the longest ballads in the tradition survived far longer in the non-literate Scots and Irish Travelling communities than they did in the literate settled communities.
The cross-over between literary creations such as The Bramble Briar (Boccacio's Decameron) or Lord Gregory (Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) has never been fully explained - chicken or egg?
I am at present indexing and annotating part of our collection of London/Irish material for archiving and have come across stories (refered to as yarns) from a building worker, originally a fisherman and currach maker from West Clare. These include jokes sharing their plots with Chaucer's Merchant's Tale; (blind, cuckolded husband is persuaded to climb tree) and part of 'The Spanish Bawd (a play written in 1499 and translated into English 1631). How did they get into the repertoire of a poorly educated McAlpine's Man?
The same man had 'yarn' versions of Child ballad, The Bishop of Canterbury and The Merchant and The Fiddlers Wife, a song that appeared in 'Pills To Purge Melancholy in 1702 and has not turned up in the tradition since then.
I think it would be unwise to discard the influence of literature on our song traditions before we fully understand it - don't you?
Jim Carroll