Hi Richie,

It's interesting to see the different versions listed geographically like this. The first thing that strikes me is how little evidence there is of any singing tradition of the old Gosport ballad in Britain. Buchan's text is the same as that in the Scottish chapbooks of about 25 or more years earlier. Christie's six sample stanzas are from Buchan (but that doesn't mean the singer wasn't singing the same version). Ethel Findlater's is very close to the Deming broadside (or perhaps we should now say the Baltimore broadside), so most likely derived from an American source. You'd think the Gosport ballad must have been popular in the C18 to judge by the number of printings, but perhaps the success of "Polly's Love" drove it out of tradition. It would be interesting to know what the version in the Greig-Duncan collection is like - but my bets would be on its being similar to Buchan and the chapbooks, being in the same part of the country as Buchan and Christie's singer.

Rather than having to assume that Deming-specific elements in the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia versions got there via a now lost British C18 broadside, isn't it plausible enough that they simply indicate the more recent (19th C)circulation of the American version itself there, whether in broadsides or books? The text in Mackenzie is clearly simply the Deming text itself, probably memorized by the singer and slightly modified in her recollection. It's not something independently derived from an earlier version of it. I know other singers don't reproduce the text so closely, but by the time these oral versions were recorded, the Deming version had been around for more than a century, so would have had plenty of time not just to spread in print but also to mix with other versions (like "Polly's Love") in oral tradition.