The poor sentence about the frigid or injured woman in the comment by Alan Lomax and Pete Kennedy is not what I wanted to stress. I've quoted the comment because of its reference to Robert Graves' interpretation, that I consider very interesting. I think that Barbara Allen wouldn't have been for centuries so important among the folk songs of the English-speaking world were it just a ballad about a broken-hearted lover and an "Eros and Thanatos" tale. Roberto