"Why does it matter that a Lancastrian woman was able to remember 17 verses of 'Lord Bateman' in 1973?"

Because I've been arguing that only a tiny minority of people know even one verse of 'Johnny B. Goode', a song that's only 60-odd years old and which many of us have heard many times over on radio or TV ads. That Lancastrian woman was remembering in considerable detail a song that, at the time the collector Fred Hamer visited her, was over two hundred years old, at the very least.

She'd learned it from her elder sister eighty years previously, at a time when old songs were still being passed on from one generation to the next. Meanwhile there were hundreds of other instances of people in different localities being able to remember their own version of 'Lord Batemen' - most probably (we don't know in every case but it's a reasonable guess) as a result of it having been passed on within families or maybe peer groups.

The point being that, in a culture in which entertainment was largely self-generated - i.e. people singing for themselves - those people got to know their songs a lot better than people in our present-day culture, where most of us absorb our entertainment ready-made. Those people in the 19th century and before knew and loved their songs well enough to pass them on to their kids. How many parents today are singing their children to sleep with 'Johnny B. Goode', 'Yellow Submarine' or any of the other usual candidates for 'modern folk songs'?

So, I suggest, 'Lord Bateman' is a folk song (in the old sense, I stress once again) whereas 'Johnny B. Goode' is, not one now and unlikely to become one. Does that make sense?

"Interesting that Sam Lee is still turning up new stuff... "

Very interesting and inspiring. Mind you, Cecil Sharp wouldn't have expected Lancastrian women to be singing 17 verses of 'Lord Bateman' in 1973, never mind travellers in 2012. His predictions of the imminent extinction of the oral tradition were inaccurate in terms of timescale. A few pockets still survive, and it's no surprise that's happened in certain traveller communities. Thomas McCarthy is bloody good, too.