Ballad wars of early 20c. were between the communalists, who felt ballads were written by the folk, and the individualists. The decisive moment was Cecil Sharp’s 1907 ‘English Folk Song: Some Conclusions’ – he noted that ‘communal composition is unthinkable’ 1/3

However Sharp said that the community ‘weigh, sift, and select from the mass of individual suggestions those which most accurately express the popular taste’ and this process goes on unceasingly. Until, that is...

‘The singing and the harping fled
Into the silent library’ (Edwin Muir, ‘Complaint of the Dying Peasantry’).
These notes are made from Alan Bold’s ‘The Ballad’, such a great little book...