Here is a quote from Jim Carroll, on the subject of the oral tradtion
Something I neglected to mention was what James Hogg's mother told Sir Walter Scott when she was singing him her ballads, "They were meant for singing, now you have written them down you have killed them" (paraphrase).
Apart from being a vital piece of evidnce in the literary/oral argument, that, for me, described perfectly the double edged sword that literacy was, regarding our oral traditions.
On the one hand, it helped immortalise the songs sung by the people, on the other, it eventually helped kill off the creativity of those people and turn them/us into passive recipients rather than creators of our culture.
A song set in print is by nature resistant to change;