Jon, I'm very interested in the question that you have raised with Malcolm about changes to an original informant's material. I understand that you are primarily talking about the written record. I hope that I am not drifting here when I ask about this same issue in the context of a sung performance of a ballad as a way of handing on traditional material today.

I'm asking about a rather specific situation in which a living tradition of ballad singing has now almost come to it's end, but is still being performed on stage by someone born into that tradition. She presents the songs as she learned them from her extended family, using both oral and written sources. And she doesn't hesitate to change the order, or to delete and add verses from several different versions, because "it needs to make sense". And yet she has a profound sense of responsibility for her "heritage".

I know oral traditions are not static. In this case we have a mixture. Cecil Sharp collected Child ballads from members of this family and his books are treasured in this community and used as a resource for "preserving the tradition". But they are only one resource. Some of these songs have never been written down, but have been recorded electronically, without liner note lyrics. So we are still getting an oral presentation of the tradition. In many cases, there are recordings of other family members singing the same songs so comparisons can be made. I don't know how much more "authentic" these contemporarly performances could be. And I know they aren't the same as the early 1900s.

Granted, there aren't very many of these situations left anywhere, but it still raises questions for me about how one judges the parameters of the tradition and the nature of change within a tradition.

As I read back over what I have written, I realize that I have drifted and that there is a big difference between talking about written "scholarly" sources, and living ballad singing as tradition. And there is a big difference between somebody changing a text after he/she has received it from the singer and publishing the altered text without taking responsibility for the changes, and perhaps the singer changing a family text for performance, which then becomes a part of the handing of the tradition. I would say, that the ballad singer I have in mind often notes the changes that she has made to a particular ballad when she tells the story of how she learned the song, which is almost always a part of the presentation of the song.

I guess that a part of what I am asking is who really has a right - a poor way of stating this - to change traditional ballad materials, knowing that those materials have constantly changed over time in the process of being traditional. Is it primarily a matter of taking responsibility for those changes or simply not making them in the first place. In other contexts, one might ask "what makes a particular text sacred". Surely there is a difference between that perspective and what we are talking about here. And perhaps that difference lies in the nature of this particular tradition. I'm thinking here about ballads in general, but also about the "Child" tradition in particular.