I take your point, Michael. Certainly many of those songs that (IMO) make up the relatively small percentage of songs in the corpus most likely to have originated in rural communities would need very little literacy as they generally consist of the catalogue type songs, rather than the longer ballad type. In my experience they are of the type that can be added to easily by the community.

Jim,
You may well be able to point out plenty of examples of gifted individuals in rural communities making songs. I gave some examples myself. Ireland seems to have been one of those places, but I would contend that there is very little evidence that such activities were rife in southern England in the early 19thc, or if there was then the collectors totally ignored it when they came to record that material in the late 19thc.