Vic: I agree generally that Roud is trying to focus on what we have evidence about.

On the interlinks between non-literate and literate in terms of traditional singing, I recently came across a piece which demonstrates convincingly (to me, anyway) that a song collected from a non-literate traveller, whose father was also non-literate originated in a Broadsheet.

http://www.mustrad.org.uk/letters.htm

The piece provides examples of the range of methods used to reach the conclusion, which I found interesting, as I had been wondering about these. An example is good to see, and hopefully, relevant to the debates on this thread.

Maybe, since this is a controversial subject, Roud might helpfully have spent longer discussing the methods behind some of the quoted percentages. Sorry if I said this before. Trying to bring the discussion back to Roud.


I discovered the mustrad site recently; bit of a mixed bag, maybe, but vast amounts of fascinating material is there.

Tzu