"People making up songs locally isn't really "a strange phenomenon""
No it isn't, but the fact that the songs remained anonymous, even to the singers who must have been around when they were made and who took the trouble to learn them, most certainly is.
It's also fairly important that this was happening all over the country, wherever there was a healthy song tradition.
One of the saddest aspects of this is that, with few exceptions, because the songs had little relevance outside their immediate areas they never survived - a neglected piece of oral history.
Jim Carroll