Liz The Squeak said: "To determine the 'gender' of the narrator, you have to work through the song as a whole. Some are definately male perspective (I met a maiden and shagged her), some are female (I met a pretty ploughboy who shagged me), some indeterminate (I met a maiden who told me she'd been shagged by a ploughboy) and others 'bi' as it were... being 'doable' by either male or female voices. ..."

Hmm, Liz, you seem to have covered about 75% of the themes in folk music there.   *g*

Yes, my question was more about the seemingly smaller variety of male names mentioned in song than about the number of mentions.   Joe, Johnny, Willie, Billy, Georg(ie), Tom(my) and a few others seem to have most of the 'market cornered', while the ladies the male 'narrator' has shagged (or would like to) or has murdered (or would like to) seem to go by a plethora of names.

Maybe that's just because men tend to shag (or hope to shag) -- or murder (or hope to murder) a wider array of specimens of the other gender than vice-versa.   Or are there fewer male names that are melodic sounding or rhyme-able?

Of course, songs about real-life people tend to use whatever names they had. And names like Mary and John are very common in English-speaking countries -- and easier to rhyme than Robert and Elizabeth, for instance.

What I'm wondering is, if we remove the variation that's due to how common various names are (or were), is there still some reason for more female names than male names to be immortalized in song?