"You were. You were describing songs you'd collected."
Actually I wasn't - I was describing information we collected, particularly on local song-making, which had all but disappeared
The songs we collected sung by singers who learned them at the beginning of the twentieth century
We know of the existence of an oral tradition as far back as The Venerable Bede - passing songs orally probably predates that
I doubt if the sipngs Burns collected were sokld in enourmous numbers - his own poetry was but Johnson's 'Musical Museum' was somewhat confined in its sales, I would have thought - immaterial anyway
The people Burns Collected his songs from were highly unlikey to have bought them back as, even in Scotland, rural literacy was thin on the ground
One of the pieces we ded gether was from a Traveller ballad seller (the last gasp of the broadside trade) who described taking songs from the oral tradition (his fathers mainly) and reciting them to a printer who then made ballad sheets of them to be sold around the markets of Kerry - an oral tradition in print
I've been told that English farmworkers were far too busy to spendd time making songs, now I'm being told they had time and money to buy broadsides and run around looking for someone to teach them to him
You seem hell bent on wiping out any idea that working people made their songs - I thought I was the one with the "agenda"
Not convinced Jack, and I can't see wy you are
Jim