I've just found an interesting quote on the 'Anne & Gordeanna Ballad Workshop' page on Facebook. It's quoted by Ronnie Clark:

'The quote is from Margaret Laidlaw (1730-1813), the mother of James Hogg (aka The Ettrick Shepherd, also responsible for "Jacobite Relics" et alia).
When Sir Walter Scott was gathering material for The Border Minstrelsy, Margaret Laidlaw was one of his sources. After The Minstrelsy was published, she was quoted as having said to Scott -
"There war never ane o' my songs prentit till ye prentit them yersel', an' ye hae spolit them awthegither. They were made for singin' an' no' for reading; but ye hae broken the charm noo, an' they'll never be sung mair. An' the worst thing o' a', they're nouther richt spellt nor richt settin' doon." (End quote)

This shows a source singer feeling that a collector had altered her songs as he wrote them down. 'Nor richt settin' doon' means that she thought he'd written them down wrong, as well as that the act of writing them down broke their spell.

Valmai