Hot on the heels of the attack on Woody Guthrie's memory (in the form of a lawsuit against political parodists who used his "This Land is Your Land" as part of a Flash movie) is this wonderful piece on what Pete Seeger called "the folk process" — the way that traditional art has been made by ripping, mixing and burning the art that preceded it.
Guthrie may be right that Pete Seeger was the first to coin the term "folk process", but the process of oral song-transmission through through variation and selection was being analyzed even before Pete Seeger's birth in 1919. And the process itself has been operating as long as there have been songs. The folk process was described, though not so named, by Cecil Sharp in 1907: "[Development of a folk song] involves the three principles of continuity, variation, and selection."