1 The list of songs in Pardon's repertoire appears to be missing "The Yellow Rose of Texas".

Regarding the views of Bronson, stated above to be a master of analysis: I checked what he said about this song. Two separate sources have suggested that he thought it had a 'literary' origin.

a) The Fresnostate.edu ballad site gives a reference for this:

BronsonBAS: Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Ballad as Song (essays on ballads), University of California Press, 1969

May I quote from their discussion?

"Bertrand Bronson, in his essay "Edward, Edward, A Scottish Ballad" (reprinted in BronsonBAS, pp. 1-17) makes the point that this song is often included in literary anthologies as one of the best examples of the ballad art. But, he observes, it is always the Percy version which gets printed -- and this has several problems. First is a point raised by Motherwell: how does a ballad of probably-Scottish origin come to have a hero named "Edward" (as in "Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots")? (p. 3 in the essay as printed in BronsonBAS). Second, the ending in which Edward concludes by accusing his mother of plotting the whole thing occurs only in the Percy version, and that this produces the absurd situation of the mother and son both knowing what is going on and hiding it -- it's Hamlet and Claudius hunting each other, not a genuine murder mystery (this is in the "footnote" on pp. 15-17). And none of the other versions show this feature. And the Percy version cannot be traced back beyond Percy's source Lord Hailes. Bronson concludes, as Archer Taylor also concluded, that the Percy text, in addition to Percy's usual practice of archaizing and fouling up the spelling, has been rewritten to be more dramatic. Bronson's argument strikes me as very compelling, particularly since we know that Percy was often guilty of such things."

b) David C Fowler, in a book kindly recommended to me by Steve Gardham, says that Bronson 'fully demonstrated the literary origin of this song' citing a different Bronson piece, 'Edward, Edward, A Scottish Ballad' SFQ lV (1940) 1-13, 159-61