"As I've said here on innumerable occasions the Traditional Songs were made & re-made by creative masters of an exacting idiom "
And you've been challenged on innumerable occasions on the same issue.
Within a living tradition, such as existed in West Clare in Ireland at least into the 1940s, some (a tiny handful) of the songs were written by people known as songmakers and poets, but most that we know about were made (in some cases, not even written down) by people with hardly any skill at all and were taken up by others who firmed them up and re-shaped them until they reached a form good enough to be accepted and established by the community. We know this from descriptions of the circumstances of some of these having been made.
One song we know of, dealing with an arson attempt at a local police station during the Irish War of Independence, was made by four men standing on a street corner throwing lines and verses at each other until they finally came up with a roughly arrived-at product, which we were lucky enough to record in 1976.
Even songs that must have been made within the lifetimes of the singers who gave them to us, all came without known authors (even the singer who gave us the above song, made within his lifetime, couldn't give us the name of one of the makers).
The same applies to the Travelling communities which were still making songs here up to the middle of the 1970s, yet all of their self made ones still come with the signature 'Anon'. Several songs we've recorded come with descriptions of having been composed in similar circumstances as 'The Quilty Burning' as described above - by people passing ideas to one another until some sort of final product was arrived at. Quite often it appears that the songs were not launched as finished works of 'creative masters, but of mud-caked rough diamonds, very much in need of cutting and polishing, and the recipients, far from being exacting, did the best they could, then passed them on to the next singer to add his or her efforts.
It appears, to us at least, who have spent some time interviewing traditional singers on the subject, that the songs are the products of many singers of various levels of ability, over time, sometimes centuries. each adding and taking away what suits or doesn't suit them. What we have was the product of the end of that process.
If your argument has any validity whatever, the songs would have come to us with known authors and some knowledge of the people who composed them, especially as songmaking went on within a thriving tradition here in West Clare right up to the beginning of the 1950s, and still goes on in a very reduced and stumbling form.
The existence of a 'school' of anonymous composers using similar techniques to make songs which were so well composed and accepted as to have lasted for centuries, is inconceivable.
I would be interested to learn the name of one of these 'creative masters' if you had one - if not, why not?
Jim Carroll