Terry

I'm wondering if you might have got a slightly wrong impression here. People have been singing these songs, often for hundreds of years and, in places they are still singing them without knowing anything about Child or any other "folk song collectors". Child just wrote down and collated some of the many versions.

I don't think you should go under the impression that people then took Child's songs and sang compilations of them. They just kept singing the songs they had always sung (as well as popular songs of the day). Later, other people (Cecil Sharpe, Alan Lomax, Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger) found people still singing them. By then, of course, we had phonographs, tapes, videos etc.

Later still with the "folk revival", people like Martin Carthy used collected (often recently collected) versions and recorded them professionally.

Here are a few links from MusTrad which you might find interesting.

Just Another Saturday Night
Sing, Say or Pay