Many broadside ballads were copyrighted, you old fool. That was how sellers made money out of the huge cost of printing them and selling them.

Variations that some collectors got a stiffy out of what they put down to regional variations within the oral tradition were often no more and no less than attempts to get around copyright. Little Musgrave and Matty Groves were both copyrighted broadsheets, one getting around the copyright of the other... The many variations come from the two distinct published ones etc.

By Jim's reckoning, they are not folk songs then. When I decided I liked so learned Richard Thompson's Valerie, I misheard a line, and instead of singing 'she has gold in her ear" I sang "she's got Gonorrhoea..." Does that make my earlier mistake "in the oral tradition"???

Michael. I am aware of your age, I wouldn't take the piss out of nurse and medication otherwise. If you insist on taking the credit for claiming part of a genre as being the only bit deserving of the group term, carry on. I feel less guilty that way.

I love how some say that those who don't get hung up over the actual definition of folk are somehow goose steppers, (Jim's lovely description of me,) haters of music and other such nonsense.

The question was related to how you claim a new song as folk. Well, if it ain't opera, acid rock, punk, rap etc, what is it? Well, which audience did you have in mind when you wrote it? Oh, a folk audience?

It's a folk song then.

Ask writers of contemporary folk.

zzzzz