You really should quote Lloyd's source when asking about the song, so that we all know what we are talking about. He got this one from Patrick Joyce's Old Irish Folk Music and Songs (1909). As mentioned in a previous discussion (Lyr Req: (I Have Waited For) Many A Night And), Joyce quoted it from childhood memory. Hugh Shields, to whom I have already referred in the previous discussion (The Grey Cock: Dawn Song or Revenant Ballad? in E.B.Lyle, Ballad Studies, pp. 67-92) was suspicious of this text, wondering whether there had been some unacknowledged editorial intervention (particularly in the first verse), while accepting that the revenant, and the change of sex, were not down to Joyce (who, incidentally, wrote "my", not "me", throughout).

There may be some influence here from Fair Margaret and Sweet William (Child 74, Roud 253) which -unusually- features a female visiting revenant; David Mallet's 1724 re-write of it, a popular broadside offering, concentrates as above on the visit, and features equivalents of Joyce's verses 2 and six. There are also echoes of Proud Lady Margaret (Child 47, Roud 37) in the final verse; and of Sweet William's Ghost (Child 77, Roud 50), come to that. Further confusion arises from the fact that revenant ballads and night-visiting songs both regularly, though for different reasons, feature crowing cocks.

That is speculation, of course. Roud places this Lover's Ghost with the various Willie O, Grey Cock and other vaguely related ballads under Child 248, Roud 179. In this he follows precedent, though as I've mentioned in the past most Grey Cock examples contain no supernatural features, and the only real relationship to Willie O is the night-visiting scenario and the occasional importing of verses from Willie O into the Grey Cock.

It is largely too late to do very much about the confusion that arose in the wake of the recording of Cecilia Costello's hybrid set of Willie O/Grey Cock, I expect. For what it's worth, I'd tend to consider this one to be another hybrid, though it is more problematic and one can't really trace the various elements to obvious sources as can be done with Mrs Costello's song. As such it may be a special case: file under 248 if you need to categorise it, I suppose, but with reservations.