I think it will be relevant here to quote, as I have done on a previous thread, what I wrote on this subject (re Mrs Hogg & Sir Walter Scott) in my article on Folklore in the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature [NY 2003] —

'"They were made for singin' and no for readin', but ye hae broken the charm now, and they'll never be sung mair." Her words have been called prophetic, but the resultant decline in living folklore was probably a factor of the same influences that led to the folkloric researches of Scott and others in the first place — awareness that urbanization and the spread of easily accessible forms of popular entertainment (pleasure gardens, music-hall; later, radio, cinema, television, recording) were undermining those popular roots on which the uninhibited spread of living folklore depends, and a consequent desire to preserve what could be saved before it vanished entirely. Although the folk forms have turned out tougher than this pessimistic view suggested, it is true that, from the invention of printing onward, every technological and popular artistic development had tended to fix the form. Mrs Hogg, alas, was too late.'