I dig provenance; its an essential part of my appreciation of stuff as a whole. In the antiques trade there is a lot of forgeries & repros; I find the residue of older times to be possessed of a particular patina which whilst being difficult to fake is not impossible, hence the necessity for provenance and the dedicated work of the taxonomists & taxidermists whose work I only deride because of the inherent class condescension one encounters in most areas of Folkloric Studies of a Certain Period & the legacy thereof.

I suppose we could open up a whole new can of worms here regarding the qualities of Traditional Songs - the recent ballad thread was an interesting example of this, but ultimately failed to grab me despite my passion for ballads. To do so would require a much broader remit on the societal conditions in which these songs arose, and discussion on the actual mechanics of the Folk Process, which to many would appear to be an end in itself, rather than the consequence of what I regard as highly exacting craftspersonship which is the key to any musical genre on whatever level of culture. This is why I stress the importance of individuals working within a tradition. I might cite the case of a young working-class non-musician by the name of Peter Hook who was moved to go out out and buy a bass guitar after seeing the Sex Pistols at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976. Within two or three years he has not only absorbed the tradition of popular bass guitar playing, but reconstructed its entire vocabulary and inspired others to do likewise. This is the nature of tradition & individual mastery as a living idiom; we can see this happening, observe it & account for it because it is our common history. Even the most idiosyncratic Pop Singer, be it Lady Gaga or Mark E. Smith, is part of an ongoing tradition of music. No different from the quirky traditional singers who were as much valued for their evident idiosyncrasy as they are for being bearers of the tradition.   

With the old songs it's difficult because all we've got is the residue - the circumstantial evidences. Because we weren't there when they were made we might only conjecture, and ponder why they exist in such a proliferation of variation. That this seems somehow remarkable to academic minds is perhaps because the processes of music are somehow feral, exotic, alien - thus it becomes a subject to be studied at some considerable remove from the context in which it occurred - its natural habitat as it were, which is all but lost to us now. So now we're back to provenance, to origin, and the part this plays in our appreciation of the songs themselves which, I would argue, is not inconsiderable for very good reason.

Folk Song study is not an exact science, but it does have a very obvious Orthodoxy. As a Fortean I am suspicious of orthodoxies, even Fortean ones....