Steve
LL - varied. Quite often it was sung freely.
It is (I think - not to hand at the moment) to be found on the album we put together of Clare singer Tom Lenihan, 'Paddy's Panacea'.

Duncan Emrich was not a great folklorist - his writings were idiosyncratic and contradictory (and recognised as such among other 'great folklorists'), even within the covers of one book (see New Green Mountain Songster). He was one of the leading exponents of the nonsensical theory that 'The Lakes of Coolfinn' (Col Fin) concerned magic islands and water nymphs rather than the beautiful drowning tragedy that it obviously is. I take it that you do concur with his view concerning "repetition and creation'.
If you want to put the authorship of the songs and ballads (particularly the latter) into context, I suggest you take a look at traditional storytelling, which was in no way influenced by print. Listen to Alec Stewart, Jeannie Robertson, (or any of the big Irish storytellers we recorded) and it is obvious that their material comes out of the same stable. The Stewarts' classic tales are set in the same speech patterns and disciplines as the ballads - incremental repetition, commonplaces, runs..... they are all there. In other words, they take the form of prose ballads.
One of the things that disturbs me about all this has a somewhat personal side to it.
I grew up in a working class background (and remained a manual worker all my working life). One of the last things I remember being told by my Secondary Modern teacher a few months before I left school was that people like me didn't create, and if I wanted art and creativity I had to go to my betters, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Mozart..... He told me that all I needed to know when I left school was to tot up my wage packet at the end of the week - I fell for that for a time, until I discovered what I believe to be 'peoples' music'.
I was apprenticed on the Liverpool docks and became fascinated with how the people I worked with used language, the humour, the quickness of wit, the dexterity and creativity, the ability to paint pictures with words. That hovered in the background of my mind until I heard MacColl's, Seeger's and Parker's Radio Ballads which were based on workers' language - at its best.
I posted a section of an interview with Traveller Mikeen McCarthy earlier on. We worked with Mikeen for thirty years and have something like 130 tapes of him, singing, telling stories, imparting folklore.... but most of the time simply describing Travelling life and work in rural Ireland in the first half of the 20th century and urban life in England in the latter. One of the main features of our recordings is that Mikeen spoke poetry, not formally or self conciously, but naturally. His use of language was that of the ballads and songs, so much so that when a radio producer came along to make a programme on our work last year she devoted a whole programme (out of three) to him alone.
We found this to a greater or lesser degree wherever we worked, Rural Ireland, other Travellers such as 'Pop's' Johnny Connors, in Norfolk with the fishermen and with Walter, with Duncan Williamson - even to the first recording we ever made of an old docker describing his experiences in the trenches in WW1.
It is inconceivable (to me, at least) that such abilities did not people with such a natural grasp of language shouldn't use that ability to create.
I've given you an example with the bothie songs, which you continue to ignore and instead concentrate on our work in Ireland as if it was another planet. Why Ireland should be any different than England is beyond me - it has a very strong Anglo/Irish song tradition and if you wanted to hear the Child Ballads from source singers in the last 40 years you'd be far more likely to find them here than anywhere else in these islands.
I've spent nearly half a century involved in folk music, and a considerable amount of that time has been in arguing that folk song is the creation and expression of 'the people' and not the 'crumbs that drop from the table of the literate'.
It seems that this is a continuation of that argument.
Jim Carroll