"You're addressing the wrong Jim,"
Thanks for that Brian, saves me the trouble
Far from Child ballads being the domain of academics, some of our finest and most important Child ballads have come from Travellers, mainly Irish and Scots - right upto th latter half of the 20th century.
Hamish Hederson called them as the Muckle (big) songs and MacColl who breathed life back into 137 of them, described them as "the high-watermark of the tradition and compared them to the best of Shakespeare.   
"You have no concept whatsoever of the evolution of traditional song, it's integration into the fashions of the day, "
Neither does anybody else to a great extent as very few people have ever bothered to ask the singers about them to any great extent; but those of us who are interested in them, who actually like them and who have got up off our arses to try and find out about them are entitled to make an educated guess based on the information we manage to glean.
(poor use of the apostrophe there by the way!!)
Jim Carroll