The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #17189   Message #4209520
Posted By: Robert B. Waltz
09-Oct-24 - 01:09 PM
Thread Name: Origins: Billy Brink / Bluey Brink
Subject: RE: Origins: Billy Brink / Bluey Brink
The Sandman wrote: well people occasionally mis attribute things to be tradtional, including bring us a barrel and fiddlers green That song hot asphalt seems to be Words: Thomas Johnstone; Music: Beers or Dodworth orJohnstone, and from the music halls, since you find scholarship correctness to be necessary.

Scholarship has now abandoned the delusion of "communal composition," so the only test of traditionality is being found in the tradition. This does sometimes raise copyright problems -- a song can be traditional and not public domain. But "Hot Ash Pelt" is p.d. as well as traditional.

Most music hall songs don't go into oral tradition, of course, but it's certainly not unheard-of. Taking just R. P. Weston as an example, there is at least one traditional or pseudo-traditional collection of all of the following Weston songs (I call some "pseudo-traditional" because they may have been learned from recordings, but they were field collected):

Anne Boleyn (With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm)
Goodbye-ee
The Gypsy Warned Me
I'm Henery the Eighth I Am
Paddy McGinty's Goat
Private Michael Cassidy
Rawtenstall Annual Fair
Sister Susie's Sewing Shirts for Soldiers
Where Are the Lads of the Village Tonight?

About half of those were from the repertoire of Alice Kane, but still, she learned them as a child and remembered them. Several others have become camp songs. Popular song has always been a prolific source of folk songs!