The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #65699   Message #1084164
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
01-Jan-04 - 05:46 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Req/Add: Kemp Owen (from Frankie Armstrong)
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: frankie armstrong's kemp owen
This isn't a traditional text, but a modern re-write collated from the three examples in Child. I don't know who made it; Brian Peters recorded it too (several years earlier), and wasn't specific. Does Frankie say where she got it?

Only one tune has ever been found in tradition for this rare ballad, and that came from Mrs Anna Brown of Falkland, Aberdeenshire; as noted it's a bit peculiar, but Brian uses it (regularised somewhat) and I should imagine that Frankie does, too. I could check your transcription against Brian's singing, but presumably you want the exact words that Frankie recorded; these seem to be a little changed in places from what Brian recorded a few years earlier. Both arrangements are certainly from the same source, whatever that might be.