Btw, nooo greg stephens. No Froggie, Uh-Uh. If you put those lyrics to Froggie, you effectively remove every last trace of humor from it. Whereas if you sang it to St. Bees would be torn between the desire to laugh out loud or throw a drink in your face, on the other I would not feel any ambivalence whatsoever about going for the drink. If there's one thing in this world I could not abide, it would be a yahoo singing about a lethal sex machine without the slightest sense of irony. No sir. And if you sing this with any sort of a drawl, ye shall not be spared!

Lighter, that is not a valid theory. It's absurd. Women have always had their songs. There is this one, "I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again" (Oh Lord). That is pretty much "When I Was A Maid" - except that Granny decided it needed to be injected with a little humor to take some if the sting out. And I'll bet she had a whole slew of fiddling, banjo strumming, catpaw clacking relatives to help her add the finishing touches.

"The Maid Freed From The Gallows"? Let's see...who hopes to be rescued by their own true love when deserted by their family? Well, anybody I guess, but in this case, it's a maid. And I would infer also that he had something to do with her predicament. All you have to do is research the history of hanging women in Britain, particularly young women, girls, to figure out what she was likely guilty of. It is probably the reason her crime was not explicated, and why the crime was reduced to a non-capital offense by 1922 due to a sea change in the way the judiciary and the people looked upon such an unfortunate event. Most of these young women were servants by occupation and under the age of 16. The sad thing is, we know that babies are sometimes stillborn and sometimes they die shortly after birth. Since many a young girl gave birth alone (with her back against a thorn as it were), there were no witnesses to clear her of that particular wrongdoing. According to the Infanticide Act of 1624, for an unmarried woman, the mere act of concealing the baby's death was proof of guilt. I'm sure most of these infants died at the hands of their Cruel Mother, but the odds are, at least a few of them were unjustly accused.

So maybe when the true love comes to save her, he is really coming to inform the judge of her innocence. And why would he do that? Damned if I know. I've never been able to figure men out. Could be he knows of her innocence and feels he must step up to avert a miscarriage of justice. Could be he doesn't want her to hang and feels he must step up and lie to save her life. Men are funny creatures. You never know what they're going to do when they're not inventing strange sex machines :-)