Matthew,'Didn't Carpenter encourage Bell Duncan to come up with fuller versions of ballads by showing her examples in Child?'

Profuse apologies. I suppose the name 'Carpenter' here is a clue to how wrong I was. I was so taken up with the idea that Greig had done the same with Bell Robertson that my eyes simply saw Carpenter as Greig. I should know the Bell Duncan article off by heart, the book is practically next to my computer.

Another feature of the influence collectors can have on source singers is the source singer's great desire to please collectors. Here we must remember that some of these singers had kept these songs in their hearts for decades without anyone, even their own families, taking an interest. All of a sudden someone starts to take an interest and wants to record them for posterity. Several collectors (Baring Gould for one) claim that, when asked for a specific song, singers have actually made up a song on the spot just to oblige, or have gone away and actively sought out a version for when the collector comes back. I have met with this myself.

Also I've come across an example similar to the Davy stewart one given above. It concerns Child 295B, which in my belief is a concoction sent to Child by Baring Gould. Baring Gould spliced together 2 broadside ballads, one of them quite common, Sally and her True Love Billy/ The Sailor from Dover. Naturally when the early American collectors came across versions of this (which were numerous)they put it under the Child title 'The Brown Girl'. Ironically one of the later collected Kentucky versions actually mentions a 'Brown Girl'. One can easily imagine the scenario. Early collector approaches singer and records quite ordinary version of Sally and Billy and is enthusiastically told by the collector that this is a version of an important Child ballad called 'The Brown Girl'. Twenty years later another collector comes along to record same singer or one of the family only to find the same song with a 'Brown Girl' mentioned in it!