My thanks to Anne for further enlightenment.

> Further, when I said that it was sung as a Scottish version I was possibly not expressing myself clearly -- what I meant was that no-one in the audience would have imagined it as anything other than of Scottish origin as it was sung with such commitment. <

I agree about Jeannie's commitment, in that and any other ballad. Her set of words is very close to many American versions, but she certainly gave it a Scots character.

I suspect what happened was that Jeannie took an American set of words (from Jean Ritchie or someone else) and that her two tunes were the one from Jean and one that she had from a Scots source, the latter being presumably the one that's on the recording. If she did marry a set of words from one place to a tune from another, she was neither the first nor the last to do so, and well qualified to pick good ones.

If Andy Hunter (or anyone else) has further light to shed I shall be interested to see it.

Richard