Steve wrote:
>> My true love I've lost; Famous Flower of Serving Men; The London Heiress....Laurence Price <<

Steve, I'm very interested in your thesis that many of our traditional songs - particularly the later ones - may have originated with broadsides or staged productions. It seems to tie in with the repertoire of an 1800s Derbyshire musician I've been looking at lately, many of whose tunes were originally song melodies written for comic operas and the like. I was sorry I couldn't attend the recent meeting on broadsides in London.

Regarding Laurence Price, I understand he was also the author of 'A Warning for Married Women', which is Child's A text for #243 James Harris / The Demon Lover, but Child's idea that this 1657 broadside was the *original* text has been strongly disputed. It reads more like a hack's bowdlerization of an existing ballad. I seem to remember that 'Famous Flower' is referred to in a work predating Price as well. The point being that finding an author's name doesn't necessarily confirm a given text as the original. And I tend to agree with Jim that the texts collected from tradition generally sing a lot better than some of the wordy and cumbersome broadsides.

One other question: if you take a song with a number of known variants that differ significantly in terms of text - 'Sailor Cut Down' is an obvious one, or maybe Newry Town / Adieu Adieu / Rambling Blade etc. - do you find a similar number of broadsides carrying variant texts that correspond with those alternatives? And if so, would you guess that it was the result of broadside writers plagiarising variants from tradition, or inventing their own variants?