Sometimes it is!
It may be my own upbringing. I grew up thinking that folk songs were actually
written by some amorphous entity called "the folk", or perhaps "anonymous".
If it was traceable to someone who actually took pen in hand and wrote down words
or a melody from his or her own head, then it was no longer "folk".
But of course even "the folk" have or, at some point farther back in
time, had names. Strange as it may seem, more often than not, somebody really
did tell a particular joke first.
Richard
Israel's Crumb List, or the list of breads for Tashlich, is a fascinating
case in point. Richard Israel, a well respected Conservative rabbi (he died in
2000) posted his (this time it's accurate) original list of breads to a rabbis
mailing list. From there ... well, as Dan Bricklin writes in Attributing
a Joke, Israel wrote that: It was circulated not
only with no attribution, but also with spurious attribution. If A sent it to
B, B assumed that A wrote it and gave A credit. There were any number of A's who
were given such credit. But the worst was when someone showed me a copy of the
list which they thought was clever and I responded that I had written it. 'You
did not!' He said, 'No one wrote it.' It had become folk-lore and it was apparently
my lot to have my fifteen minutes of fame anonymously.
Rabbi
Israel later encoded his name, in an acronymic fashion, into a later edition of
the text, though by that time he had already started receiving the recognition
he deserved. My brother maintains a
page devoted to these tashlich breads in which he makes every effort to give
credit to whoever can be identified as the originator of yet another item on the continually growing
list.
Go to:
Original?, or
Go to: The
friend of a friend of a friend of ...