I meant mainly just to say "don't take too much for granted". It depends on where you learnt a song, and what had been done to it previously; and what arrangements the country in which you live has concerning copyright and the collection of Mechanical and Performing Rights charges. Nobody's going to come after you for singing a song in an informal setting (or any other kind, for that matter) but a venue that regularly hosts musical events may have to pay a license fee up front to cover "inadvertent use" of copyright material. If you make a commercial recording, of course, stricter rules apply.

Some of the tunes in Bronson were reproduced by permission of their owners (don't forget that some were collected by, or from, people still living), and similar permissions should, technically, be sought for their reproduction elsewhere. Again, in practice, it is unlikely that anyone would mind in the least unless there were money involved or the printed set were reproduced in facsimile (in which case some formal agreement would be required), but as a normal courtesy such reproduction should in any case always include the names of singer and collector (and, where applicable, editor and publisher). A great many folk song books were published specifically to furnish fresh material for singers, and with no intention of collecting royalties from such use; paradoxically, the songs in such books tend to be the most altered from the (often garbled or incomplete) forms in which they were found in tradition, and are in some cases virtually new compositions (though made with re-cycled materials). The copyright status of such material, though it undoubtedly is copyright, tends to be theoretical only; never enforced (so far as I know) where someone sings or records the material; reproduction in print or equivalent is another matter, though I doubt if anyone would bother much about it except in the case of clear abuse.

In the case of The Famous Flower, there are a number of traditional tunes known for it (including some found since Bronson published); the DT file has two (uncredited) tunes, one of which is traditionally associated with the ballad (a version from New Hampshire, as it happens); the other, though traditional, belongs to a quite different song. Martin Carthy learned it from Hedy West, and set his re-written version of The Famous Flower to it. The DT text is not in itself a traditional one, but is a collation made from bits and pieces from various sources, but chiefly Carthy, who added a certain amount of material which does not appear in traditional versions.

As it happens, we know who wrote the original ballad (it was Laurence Price, and he registered it in 1656) but doubtless he based it on earlier material of some sort (not necessarily a song). That doesn't affect its status as the traditional song it subsequently became, though. There are times in the life of a song, however, when, even if it is indisputably "traditional" in some of its forms, a particular example of it will be "fixed" in a particular shape, whether through the publication (and consequent entering into the copyright cycle) of a particular version, or by the intervention of an editor or performer who consciously re-shapes it, sometimes quite radically, for artistic purposes. In this way, there can exist both public-domain and "owned" forms of a song.

Is the "owned" form still traditional? Opinions will differ, and I am not the judge of them; but my feeling at the moment is that a song found in tradition and published "as is" is unaffected except insofar as the collector and source have a legal interest in that version of it (which they may choose not to enforce); whereas a form consciously and significantly modified for publication or for recording is not a "traditional version", though it may be a version of a thing that is traditional; and may in its own right eventually enter tradition alongside its cousins still living in the wild, so to speak.

Little of this need concern Minnesinger; I mention it because it's a topic I find myself having to consider quite a lot just at present, and to illustrate the point that the whole "traditional/public domain/owned" question is a great deal more complex than is generally realised.

Oh yes, the source of the Scarborough Fair tune that Paul Simon got from Martin Carthy. That particular version came from Mark Anderson, a retired lead-miner of Middleton-in-Teesdale, Yorkshire, in 1947. It was printed in Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's book The Singing Island in 1960, noted in a combination of 6/4 and 9/4 time.