"but there is a vast difference in old trad. style folk songs and more modern works already recorded"
I agree entirely.
" But surely we are in an age where you don't just take a recorder out and archive everything without looking into where stuff came from"
Again, I'm with you, though I'm not sure how those who believe all songs are folk songs if they are sung in a pub, or at a folk club handle that one
Many of the singers I know are not computerised (certainly the old crowd weren't) and would tell you that songs like The "Dargle" (Derby) ram were as Irish as Shamrocks.
Professor Horace Beck's study, 'Folklore and the Sea' documents 'Bonnie Shoals of Herrin' as being "collected in Dingle, County Kerry in 1969, and says, "this is typical of songs popular among fishing flleets, up to this day (ten years after the song was written.
We have recorded Freeborn Man , Dirty Old Town, Come Me Little Son... and other songs from Travellers who swore they were Travellers songs - one Traveller family sings 'The Springhill Mine Disaster' on the streets of our market town every Saturday.
"who is responsible?"
Personally, I find people who write and copyright songs and claim them to be folk as wanting to have their cake and eat it.
One of the strangest things I learned recently was from a Mudcatter (Don Firth?) who drew our attention to a college course on folksong which advertised as "starting from (some pop group whose name escapes me) - bloody insane!
MacColl used to dream of a time when newly written songs would be taken up and absorbed into a revived oral tradition, but he never claimed it as having happened to his own songs, and he never lived to see it happen - nor, I believe, shall any of us.
Jim Carroll