Thanks for your answer to my question, Brian. I take what you say about song collectors.

As it happens, one of the points I made in my first post was that we do not have the answer to one rather sensible question in respect of Walter Pardon. I believe this to be true because I read it on MUSTRAD. That question is 'Where, when and from whom did you learn that song?'. Indeed, on MUSTRAD somebody writes that Walter tended to tell different people that he had the same song from different sources.

And this is not the only case of a lack of clear information. For example, I have just read that Pardon had over 200 songs, with a solid base of some 100 complete songs.

Whereas on MUSTRAD { http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/pardon2.htm } it says "As a result of all this work we now know the titles to 182 songs that Walter knew. A small proportion of these songs were only known as fragments, usually of one or two stanzas, but the majority were known to him as complete songs, about 70 of which would probably have been considered to be 'folksongs' by Cecil Sharp. Of the remaining hundred or so songs, most were either parlour ballads or else were from the late Victorian Music Hall."

So I would suggest, with respect, that there is some disagreement about how many songs Pardon knew and of these how many were fragments. This is before we even get started on where he learned them, and the question, likely to be a very vexed one, about such matters as whether a particular song was 'folk' or of dung-heap origin! Isn't it odd that such an issue is open after all the hours and hours of tape recording?












But I was being more specific: I was thinking about the extract