"I simply feel that it is worth reminding the thread of what the past agreements were."

Interesting post, 'GUEST' (though as ever I'd prefer to know who I'm talking to). But aren't there two separate issues here?

'Song ownership', as practised in those Sussex pubs, seems to be alive and well in many current singing circles, if previous discussions on Mudcat are any guide. It's a matter of basic etiquette in a social group, as much as anything.

The second point, that certain songs "should only be sung by people from that area" was far from an 'agreement', then or now - witness the continuing and often fierce debate regarding Ewan MacColl's alleged injunction to that effect. While it's true that a relatively small number of English folk songs are specific to an area, the majority were printed in large numbers in cities all over the country, and most of the stuff the collectors chose to note down wasn't confined to any specific region.

"many people came from areas where the tradition had died, or perhaps more accurately was at the same almost invisible level it always had been"

The pattern of song collecting in England was very patchy, with large areas of the country pretty much untouched. I don't know of any evidence that a singing tradition in those areas had always been 'mostly invisible' - we simply don't know for certain, but in my mind the likelihood is that it was much the same everywhere, allowing for the effects of industrialization. There's not a lot of material from Northern England compared to, say, the South-West, but when Frank Kidson started looking in Yorkshire he found plenty - and it was broadly the same kind of repertoire.

Personally I'd steer clear of a song in a dialect that's not my own, or one that relates to a specific tradition in a distant locale, but I have no problem singing, say, 'Henry Martin', just because the two most familiar recordings are from the Gower Peninsuala and East Anglia.