" provided they had been absorbed and refashioned by the community."
It depends on how you construe the term 'absorbed'
Does repeating a song mean it has been absorbed - not in my book, it doesn't
I believe it to be far more complicated that that - it involved ownership and identification.
Let's face it, as far as communities are concerned, the popular songs all came with a shelf-life as do all popular songs - shorter nowadays than they once were
Largely they came into the repertoires stillborn and remained unaltered.
One of the great mistakes in assessing our folk-songs is regarding them as 'entertainment'
They were thi, of course, but they were much, much more than that.
Harry Cox's "and that's what they thought of us" piece of venom makes in clear that there was something going on between him and Betsy the Serving Maid' than immediately meets the ear.
We got similar responses from the singers we met.
'Pop's' Johnny Connors entitling his version of Edward' 'Cain and Abel' and claiming that Cain was the founder of the Travelling people was the first time we ever came across this
We were not the only ones to have noticed this relationship between traditional singers and their songs
Ken Goldstein had similar experiences, particularly with a New York State singer Sara Cleveland - the work done by Lomax with Texas Gladden touches on the same theme
Jim Carroll