Just when you all thought (hoped?) that discussion of what the "folk" did or didn't create had fizzled out, back I come with some quotations of what one of the early collectors thought. These are in the Folk Song Journal for 2016, my copy of which got buried in a heap when I was tidying up, and emerged only yesterday.

On page 29, in Alice Little's paper, are two quotations from Anne Gilchrist about the singer William Bolton (from Journal of the Folk-Song Society 2.4 and 5.2).

In 1906 she said that his singing "includes some interesting and suggestive examples of the way in which, at times, composed tunes of a century or two centuries ago have become simplified and translated, as it were, into the native musical dialect of the untutored singer".

But then 'in 1915, Gilchrist wrote of the same singer that, because on this occasion he had added some verses that were "less artless than the remainder of this genuine if doggerel production of some sailor bard, I have omitted them, in order to maintain its character." '