" enough for it to have gone into oral tradition."
And, as you said yourself, to come from the oral tradition, I would guess far more than you claim
Popularity didn't make a thing "good" - we are served by a pop industry that relies on the fact that what it produces today will almost certainly have disappeared in six months time, to be replaced by something similar - and so ad infinitum
You said in your talk that the process was two-way yet you still talk about "a couple of thousand that made it into oral tradition" when you haven't a clue how many did, as uoi have also said.
The published broadside collections are bad because they are bad - doggrell and unsingable in the main
Even the versions of traditional songs as included in Holloway and Blacking have an awkwardness about them that is generally not present in the traditional repertoire
The excuse is that the oral tradition has knocked the corners off them yet you have compared the oral tradition with the work of "the lowest apprentices in the printers at the bottom of the market"
I really don't understand where you are coming from and am left with the impression that you don't either and haven't either - you seem to be riding one horse travelling in one direction.
The outstanding thing about our folk songs is that they have dirt under their fingernails and rope burns on their back - they smell of horse-shit, cordite and tar.
You accuse me of being a romantic and you attempt to reduce my arguments to teh 'Merrie England' and 'shepherdesses and swains' level, yet your 'Jolly Jack Tars, and Colin and Phoebe' are urban based caricatures of the lives of labouring country people, soldiers and sailors.
Sharp's collectors were carrying out a rescue mission to save was was left of a moribund culture, yet even so, the material they collected stands head and shoulders above Ashton and Hindley's doggerel pap.
I find your denigration of Child Sharp and the rest of his generation, at best, ungenerous, and academically unacceptable
It smacks of Dave Harker at his most vitriolic
Jim Carroll