I have all of Stan Hugill's books. I take it you are referring to Shanties FTSS. Sea shanties, yes, but very few American ballads figure in English repertoires. I repeat, in which English collection is there an English version of Coast of Peru?

Jim,
As pointed out before, the 'straight story' is on the TSF website of which you are a member.

In this thread I merely pointed out to you that nearly a third of the Child Ballads had their earliest version as street literature, which at first you denied. Incidentally I've found a couple more since then.

I'm going to be off-line for a while after tomorrow, and after that I suggest we stop hijacking other people's threads and start our own cutting out all the sniping and detours. I'll start off if you like by stating my case in a short simple summary and then you can take what you like from that. I'm happy to include those Child Ballads that occur in the corpus under discussion, but if you want to discuss the Child Ballads as a whole I suggest we do this in a separate thread as it can get quite confusing otherwise.