"You have not answered a single point of Pseud's correctly and there is absolutely no aggression in his post."
Yes I have Steve - this is an old argument which concers the repertoire of one of Ireland's most important field singers, 'Tom Lenihan'
The aggression came from the suggestion that anything that Pseud doesn't wish to discuss is "off topic" - it's a constant theme of hers, even to the point of demanding that I should open a new thread at one stage - that cannot go unchecked if we are to have friendly discussions
You have yet to respond to any of my points, neither has Jag - god knows there's enough to pull down

Nit-picking slips by giants like Goldstein is easy meat for someone wishing to avoid the imprtant work they did - that's how Herker operated and it did a great deal of damage to our understanding of folk song - it helped creates the fog that now surrounds the term
That is why I keep suggesting that it is more important to discuss the repertoire than the characters of collectors which Harker chose to assassinate

Even the tunes are a bit of a red herring in all this
They were portable and quite often statched out of the air rather than be attached to single songs
This would be even more true if your 'print origins' theory was correct
'The Folk' had enough problems in reading the texts - reading tunes is still out of the reach of most of us
Jim