Now it seems to me that Martin Carthy added the fey folk bit, as well as casting black bullets. Both ideas appear in Child's A version, but not in any of the English traditional texts I have seen, apart from black bullets in the rather literary version in the Baring Gould mss. where the black bullet falls on the "undutiful daughter."

The last line of the Clements tune (which is the one I attempt to sing) has a leap of a tritone. Frankie Armstrong, who also bases her version on this tune, has changed this to a perfect fifth, which I find creates less tension and is correspondingly less dramatic.