The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #169855   Message #4107236
Posted By: Brian Peters
23-May-21 - 01:46 PM
Thread Name: Tune Req: Trad. English tune for Little Musgrave?
Subject: RE: Tune Req: Trad. English tune for Little Musgrave?
Interesting discussion. Having compared the Motherwell tune with Chappell's, I thought at first that the latter was copied, and then tidied up slightly by making the quaver couplets consistently dotted and removing the unexpected flat 7th. However, the changes in bars 6 and 7 look less like editorial changes, so I'm more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, although I still think it's quite unusual to find two variants so alike in what might have been very distant locations.

The same tune crops up for #81 in the recently-published 1909 collection of the Kentucky ballad collector Katherine Jackson French. However, it's pretty obvious that she copied it from Chappell and grafted on the text of a Kentucky version collected by Olive Dame Campbell - something the editor doesn't seem to have spotted.