I'm not throwing stones, Jim - just pointing the disparity between the Source and the Collector which has long been known & accounted for, something which, as long ago as 1941, Flann O'Brien was using to hilarious effect as part of An Béal Bocht.

Otherwise...

I'd argue that Tommy Armstrong was part of the tradition he was writing within; his songs are therefore traditional in every sense and well known in his lifetime. George Bruce Thomson likewise, whose masterpiece M'Ginty's Meal an Ale was written for Grieg's column in the Buchan Observer in 1910. The notion of change in the 1954 Definition is a singular caveat which can't be a deciding factor in whether song can be considered traditional or not simply because, as we've seen, the tradition gave rise to written songs by known authors whose work remained essentially unchanged thereafter. The notion of literature in vernacular usage comes through in various songs considered to be otherwise Traditional - The Kerry Wedding is one, The Limerich Rake is another. I'm currently working up a version (with fiddle) of Paddy Tunney's translation of An Bunnan Bui which no one seems to know a fat lot about (see thread Lyr Add: An Bunnan Bui / The Yellow Bittern), least of all myself, though wading through the various versions and translations I reckon none is in quite the same league as Paddy's which is a work of singularly sublime perfection which features very much as part of the tradition.

If there were a body of skilled songmakers turning out enough songs to supply either the British or Irish repertoires, we never came across any evidence whatever, neither did you from the sound of it.

I come across it whenever I look at a traditional song - songs made and sung by true masters of their vernacular craft; the ordinary working class people, uniquely gifted, as ordinary working class people can be, much to surprise of Middle-class Folklorists, who insist on emphasing collective random process instead of considering the evidence in hand. I'm not talking about some elite school, any more than the kids I see churning out virtuouso heavy-metal licks in Manchester music shops of a Saturday belong to an elite school, or the teenage London rappers once in evidence on Channel U (when I had access to such a thing) who were upping the anti on anything coming in from America at the time. No doubt they still are, whilst holding down regular jobs too. There is great Vernacular Music everywhere I look - of all genres - the creative genius of popular culture is alive and well. Even in the Folk Scene where songwriters such as Ron Baxter, Wendy Arrowsmith, Scowie and Ted Edwards (to name but four) have created some pretty impressive stuff within an idiomatic revival tradition; Peter Bellamy likewise, who recognised that Rudyard Kipling was deriving much of his inspiration from the same vernacular sources he celebrated in many of his poems.