"What Jim seems to share with Cecil Sharp's ideology is a desire to dissociate folk music from interaction with the publishing industry of towns/cities"
I have not for one minute attempted to disassociate folk music from the publishing industry; I have been aware of that association at least since Bob Thomson did his work on the subject back in the sixties. Our own work with Irish ballad seller Mikeen McCarthy, has given us first hand knowledge of that link with print (see my article 'Mikeen McCarthy, Singer and Ballad Seller' in Singer, Song Scholar (ed Ian Russell, Sheffield Academic Press 1986). My argument is with the suggestion that our traditional repertoire ORIGINATED with the broadside presses - nothing more. Please can we avoid setting up straw men in order to knock them down and claim a victory - I really do thing this discussion is worthwhile enough for that.
An observation; at the time Child was putting his collection together the broadside presses would still have going full tilt. He was aware enough of them to refer to them as "veritable dunghills". It seems to me that it would have been, at best, extremely shoddy scholarship, and at worst, outright dishonesty, to present the products of those presses as 'The English And Scottish POPULAR Ballads', songs which had originated on those presses.
The same charge can be laid at the door of any ballad scolar, who again, would have been very negligent in dismissing any claimed authorship for the ballads they were studying, had they believed those claims to have been in any way valid.
Jim Carroll