"If were teaching a course on these ballads, I would write that up on the board on the first day and spend the whole period talking about it. What does that mean?"
One of the things we noticed was that singers who had learned songs from bound books tended to sing them exactly as they had learned them, while those printed on "ballads" were treated as "changeable" at the whim of the singer - a sort of respect for the published word.
Similarly, if the person who had passed on the song to another, either by teaching it or writing it down, was still living, the song remained unchanged.
The older singers tended to respect 'ownership' of songs in their community, certainly while their sources were living.
I understand that this was the case with Norfolk singer Harry Cox.
These were observation in passing; we never followed them up as far as I remember, so no hard-and-fast conclusions can be drawn from them.
This is part of what I mean by the effects of literacy on the tradition being by no means as straightforward or simple as some people would have us believe.
Jim Carroll