AC
"I don't swallow the "Travellers were illiterate" line of reasoning,"
A fair point but.....
We never met a Traveller who admitted to learning any of their longer songs from settled people - some of the shorter stuff - very occasionally, but they seldom stayed in one place and mixed with the settled community long enough for their repertoire to be anything but marginally influenced by 'the buffers'.
I'm pretty sure that this was also the case with the Scots Travellers.
All the 'big' singers we recorded, Mary Delaney, Paddy Reilly, Bill Cassidy got their songs from within the family - Mary referred to all her traditional songs as 'my daddies songs'.
Couple this with the fact that even among the settled communities in Ireland, literacy was treated with suspicion and seemed to have little major impact on the repertoire.
No hard and fast conclusions from all this, just general impressions.
As far as ballad composition is concerned, for me, the similarity between song and storytelling conventions, incremental repetition, runs, commonplaces, etc., are far more than coincidental and indicate that they both came from the same stable - if one is orally based, they both are and there is certainly no indication that the storytelling tradition had literary origins.
Jim Carroll