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Folk ballads have never been seen as high class or upper crust. This
is because they originated with the "folk" or common people. The oldest folk ballads are anonymous. Their time of origin and the composer were
not known. One of the reasons for this is that they were never written down during the time of their genesis. Instead, they
were learned by oral tradition and repetition. The balladeer might have song the song so often in their own home territory
that others began to sing it too, and if the balladeer or any of the others who had also memorized it went on a journey, they
might sing it in a place where it had not been heard before and so on until it became popular and widely known with varying
additions and subtractions changing the original in small ways.
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