There seem to be three different discussions going on here, and I must say I've found the exchanges between Jim and Steve very interesting, if ultimately unresolved. There is also the mystery of the tunes, which of course are not usually included in broadside copies and, where specified, are not always appropriate, or representative of tunes collected from singers. Now, if Steve is right and some of these songs were written for stage performance, then they would originally have possessed tunes - but how were these then disseminated? How much did such shows tour outside London?

Like MtheGM, I'm also struck by the fact that most traditional singers who have been questioned as to the sources of their songs said they'd learned them from family members, not from print. There was one singer on the old EFDSS Fred Hamer cassette who described buying broadsides and 'making up' the tunes, but that's a rare example.

Lastly, Steve asked:
"Which copy of 'A Warning to Married Women' ascribes the ballad to Laurence Price please? I have most of the 6 copies but I can't find it."

Dave Atkinson's paper on 'James Harris' in FMJ vol. 5 reproduces a copy of 'A Warning for Married Women' from the Euing Collection (#377) which bears the initials 'L.P.'. Dave A. credits Dave Harker for first attributing the broadside to Price, who was also the author of broadside copies if Child 106 (Famous Flower) and 147 (Robin Hood's Golden Prize).

The argument that Price's 1657 copy is not the origin of the 'Demon Lover' / 'Housecarpenter' ballad is discussed at length in Clinton Heylin's book 'Dylan's Daemon Lover', a populist and speculative account that does however contain a lot of interesting textual comparison of British and North American broadsides and collected versions. The argument rests on the fact that only a handful of Price's 32 (generally turgid and moralistic) verses correspond with those collected later from oral tradition, which tend to follow more closely the text of Child's 243B, first printed in 1737. Meanwhile, the theme of Price's 'A Warning for Married Women' strongly resembles that of the 1603 broadside 'A Warning for Maidens' (aka 'Bateman'), in which a young woman who has broken a betrothal is carried off by the spirit of her former lover.

The suggestion is that Price rewrote an existing (oral?) 'Ship's Carpenter' ballad using the template of 'A Warning for Maidens' (he even specified 'Bateman' as his tune) but retaining a few verses of the earlier ballad. Baring-Gould and Graves believed likewise that 'A Warning for Married Women' was a self-evident piece of hack bowdlerization. Price was known for adapting existing pieces - Robin Hood's Golden Prize was known as a tale more than a hundred years before he registered it. Atkinson cites a number of other examples of early broadside versions of Child ballads which do not represent those ballads' origins.

How much the tangled histories of centuries-old ballads have to do with the question of whether 'Rounding the Horn' was composed by a sailor with direct experience of Magellan's Straits and the girls of Valparaiso, is another matter. I still prefer to believe that at least some of our folksongs were composed and reworked by sons of the soil, like Uncle Bert told us they were, but I do think we need to take a lot of notice of the research by Steve and others.