"and 'fakery' or 'dishonesty'."
I was addressing my question to Steve Gardham who has been using both terms as if they were going out of fashion from quite early on
As a singer, I used Purslow extensively - he did exartly what Steve's "fakers" did before him so why not apply the same insults to him ?
I have said from the beginning that 'mediation' was common and acknowledged, my point regarding Buchan has always been that he was doing nothing all the others were doing - there was no rule-book to say that shouldn't, which is why suggesting that they were dishonest is totally wrong

Dragging Bert Lloyd into this is as ridiculous as it comes - basically Bert was a singer looking for songs who wrote in order to inspire others to do the same
For me, the most inspirational expert on ballads by far was MacColl, not because he had the Freemason's handshake or had studied them minutely from behind his desk, but because as a singer, he approached them analytically in order to bring them back to life again as what they are - stories with tunes which had strong roots into the society that produced them
He breathed fresh life into 175 of them and made them work for 20th century audiences over and over again   
One of the greatest problems I have at present is indexing and annotating Ewan's work on the ballads - once you start listening to his talks it becomes impossible not to become totally engrossed.

The best analysis I have read on Motherwall's work is William B McCarthy's 'William Motherwell as Field Collector' published in The Folk Music Journal 1987 (Vol. 5, No 3)
Jim