"The extent to which Ewan can be considered a source singer...."
At no time in my presence did I ever hear Ewan describe himself as a 'source' or 'traditional' singer - it seems to have been a far more important issue to others than it was to him.
I do know that Betsy had songs - she sang them to me. I also know from William Miller's contemporaries, particularly Eddie Frow, that he had a lot of "queer old songs", many of these in fragmentary form.
It was Ewan's practice to take many of those fragments and build them up into full texts from printed sources. Whether that qualifies his being a 'souce singer' is a matter of opinion; not in my book, and as I said, it didn't appear to matter to him.
My grandfather and great grandfather were both merchant seamen and through the former I grew up with a number of sea shanties - does that make me a 'source singer'; I don't think so.
Eppie Morrie:
Whether Ewan wrote it or not will, like the "who wrote the ballads", question, never be known.
When Peggy was compiling Ewan's songbook she sent us a list of his songs and asked us to identify their sources; we managed to trace them all back to traditional tunes.
Ewan wrote very few, if any new tunes, but based certainly most of them on existing ones.
He used the Eppie Morrie tune for several of his own songs - The Iron Road, The Fitters Song, The Ballad of Stalin....
I don't believe Bob knew where the tune came from any more than we did.
If somebody had told be thirty years ago that a ballad that had been missing from the tradition for several centuries (Maid and the Palmer) would turn up out of the blue in the mouth of a non-literate Irish Traveller I'd have told them they were barmy! Just shows how much we really know, doesn't it?
Cap'n:
"the more I liked or respected the singers singing,the more credence I would give to their view point."
I hope you don't mind me saying so but that's a very odd way of coming to a conclusion - surely the point of view offered must take precedence over your personal likes and dislikes? I can think of several people whose views I respect utterly, but who I find a pain in the arse; and even more people I like very much who I wouldn't trust to go down to the corner shop for a pint of milk.
Jim Carroll