Sorry for treading on purist toes!

I intended no significant correspondence. As much as I respect and enjoy the amazing erudition of Malcolm Douglas and others, I was seeking a reaction to the performance possibilities. Songs of very different provenances are put together in medleys when they share a common theme or cast different lights on a subject.

All of the discussion from the past about the migrations of Miss Gordon's story haven't convinced me that her first name was Peggy or Maggie, or that she even ever existed outside some balladeer's imagination. And McPhee? That's a new one to me. Is the slighted male ever identified anywhere by name or otherwise?

On the other hand, were there really Irish Dragoons marching through Fife, and was there really a captain named Ned who died of love? And what's the proper name of the town where they had to carry him, which is spelled various ways in different transcriptions? The substance of the tale is that poor Ned was slighted by some Peggy whom he might very well have called his darling, and that her brusque 'kiss-off' of his proposal would warrant a complaint that she was slighting him or treating him discourteously.

In short, if any listener were ever to hear my mingling/mangling of the sacred texts and like it and learn it and repeat it and disseminate it, it might be someday be traced back to its two unrelated origins. Isn't that the folk process that's discussed above and in so many threads and scholarly papers?