As to authenticity, I don't know. I seem to remember checking some of the Ballad Book's Child numbers and all were authentic. After I heard a recording of Leadbelly's House of the Rising Sun I had no problem with very similar words' being adapted to very dissimilar tunes.

I do not remember not knowing that Niles wrote I Wonder As I Wander and Black Is The Color. I also knew about Go Way From My Window and Venezuela as Niles is credited on the Belafonte recordings. Had Niles not written the last two, we would not have the Belafonte recordings or the Josh White recording of Go Way From My Window.

A song is a song is a song and, at some point in the recent or distant past, the song was written by someone. I think we have become too hung up on legalities and "the right thing to do" (another way of saying Political Correctness) to the expense of musicality and musicianship.

If there is a witch hunt afoot, how about Dink's Song? Does anyone else believe that Alan Lomax wrote it and pretended to have collected it?

Two quotations come to mind about the topics here. Duke Ellington is reputed to have written about music that, "If it sounds good, it is good." Pete Seeger wrote (I believe at the end of the preface to the collection of songs he wrote with others), "If, in a hundred years, a collector wants to call these songs Folk Songs, my bones will not object."