Our late mentor and friend, the Adirondack mountain (northern New York state) singer Lawrence Older had a Turpin ballad from his uncle "Thede" (Theodore). Thede's text - of which I have his handwritten copy - is almost word-for-word that of the broadside that begins: "When Fortune's blind goddess had fled my abode/ And friend proved ungrateful, I took to the road..." I've sung it occasionally for over forty years. Lawrence performed it a lot.

There was, of course, more than one Turpin ballad, and more than one was in oral tradition in the States a generation or so ago. My late wife Vaughn, a New Mexican, dug out at least one cowboy version from a different broadside.

Accurate or not, the ballads were universal enough in theme to carry on over here. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find a previously uncollected variant in some family's memory even now. Serendipity is everything.