Going back to the topic of this thread:

It has been suggested that the term 'mediation' is meaningless or useless because it is possible to distinguish a many different sorts of mediation. I think one can turn this on its head: it is because mediation occurs in so many contexts relevant to folklore that it is useful to bear in mind when encountering material from that source.

The Briggs Memorial Lecture by musician and academic Richard Jenkins that I referred to is a 'case study'. It discussed what has been written on the history of a song called 'The Streets of Loredo' or 'The Cowboy's Lament'.

This song is often said to belong to a family called 'The Unfortunate Rake'. Jenkin demonstrates that this name is the result of badly done historical research. If anything the family ought to be called 'The Unfortunate Lad', as that is the title of most of the known early (ie 19th century) variants, except for one, the earliest known variant, which was called 'The Buck's Lament' and set in Covent Garden, London.

The song is also often said to have an Irish origin. Jenkin traces this claim back to a piece written early in the 20th century (published 1911) by the amateur folklorist Phillips Barry. In that piece Barry claimed that an Irish antiquarian had made the link. Jenkin reports extensive research in the background papers of the antiquarian in question, which have been preserved. They turned up no evidence to support Barry's assertion. There is no evidence that the antiquarian in question ever mentioned a song called 'The Unfortunate Rake'. Jenkins therefore concludes that claims of an Irish origin for 'Loredo' rest on 'flimsy evidence, at best'.

The piece claimed to be an ancestor of Loredo is frequently stated to have been collected in Dublin. However, earlier pieces, going back to a collection published by PW Joyce in 1909, give Cork as the place of collection by the same collector. Jenkin traces this change of place back to a mistake in a 1955 piece by Lodewick, and shows how Goldstein repeated the mistake in liner notes to an LP featuring A L Lloyd among other people singing what purported to be versions of a song called 'The Unfortunate Rake'.

It almost goes without saying that Lloyd himself played a part in propagating this flawed historical narrative. Jenkins states that this part was played at a time when Lloyd's biographer described his attitude to historical truth as being 'cavalier'.

Jenkins concludes that this name is almost certainly wrong. He has searched everywhere for a 19th century broadside supposed to have that title and has come up with nothing but broadsides with the title 'The Unfortunate Lad'.

As Jenkins points out, dubious information about the origins of this song appear all over the internet, much of it obviously culled from the Folkways Rake LP.

This topic interests me because some friends and I also did some background research on the same topic, tracing references back through the literature, just like Jenkins did. Indeed, Jenkins cites Mudcat discussions as one source of sceptical voices relating to the folkloric narrative about the origins of the song.

Bringing things back to the point: an interesting question is whether applying the concept of 'mediation' defined in terms of the opinions, beliefs and attitudes of the mediators helps us to make sense of the way in which the narrative was constructed and disseminated over all those years. I think it can, not least in waking us up to the possibilities. So one such attitude might be a belief that certain people have done their homework properly before publishing academic-looking liner notes and magazine articles. One question might be whether Barry's high regard for Ireland as a source of music (a fully justified belief) may have swayed him in favour of finding an Irish source.