Hi Richie,

I'm not that convinced by my scenario either. As a simpler alternative, and fairer to Mackenzie, what if Mackenzie just didn't have good records of some of his early collecting and got confused years later about who he had got a particular song from? The attribution to Henderson in 1928 could simply be a mistake (or I suppose it could be the correction of an earlier mistake : maybe he had realized that the ballad the schoolgirl got from Matheson was a different one.)

Have you seen Mackenzie's earlier article in JAF, "Ballad-singing in Nova Scotia" (vol. 22, no. 85, 1909, pp. 327-331)? He writes there about how he met John Henderson, who he describes as over 80 (not 100) "summer before last", which I guess would mean in 1907. Apparently he had been famous in the district for having known the largest stock of ballads when he was young. His parents brought a collection of broadsides with them when they came to Nova Scotia around 1820. The mail was distributed from their house, and John remembered how new ballad sheets kept arriving in the post for people in the district. In this article Mackenzie doesn't mention any songs collected from John Henderson, although he does indicate that he at least tried to collect songs from him, as he mentions how "One day, when Mr. Henderson was vainly attempting to recall the words of a song which had been popular in his youth, he apologized to me for his present lack of memory, and, as an offset, explained that he had once had a better memory for ballads than any other man in the West River district."

Combining that with the 1928 mention of how Henderson couldn't manage more than one stanza of "Andrew Lammie", the general picture seems to be of someone who had been a famous ballad singer in his youth, but who could no longer remember (and perhaps no longer valued) the ballads he had once known – which might be why he doesn't feature in Quest. But on the other hand, if Mackenzie was deliberately giving a false attribution to Henderson, for whatever reason, in 1928, why would he at the same time apparently undermine it by mentioning Henderson's memory difficulties?...