And this thread is still going on? Oh well...

As for June Tabor, she was talking to me about Scottish history and balladry in the VWML. Some cloth-eared Scot called Campin seems to have been eavesdropping in a highly inattentive way and is trying to make out that we talked about rubbishy kids' street songs and the not particularly very funny "comic" output of Adam McNaughtan. This was absolutely not the case. This Scot obviously has some problem with June Tabor's work. Be that as it may, it has no place in a thread in which the OP is merely requesting the origins of Roses for Prince Charlie.

To recap how this started: Diane's initial comment on the song was:

The song is the sort of tartan-clad chauvinism that Glasgow children grow up knowing - that and Coutler's Candy and hurling jelly pieces, so it could have been worse.

I pointed out that that was wildly wrong - none of the three is in any sense a traditional Glasgow children's song, and neither "Coulter's Candy" nor "The Jeely Piece Song" is in any way tartan-chauvinistic. (The origins of "Coulter's Candy" get an interesting chapter in Ewan McVicar's book on Scottish children's songs, "Doh Ray Me When I Was Wee" - the sort of thing Malcolm Douglas might have written).

Diane's response is to say I must be wrong because her friend the torch singer was told the Jacobites were crap on a college course 30 years ago.

When I point out that there appears to be a certain lack of logical relevance here, the response is a lot of flailing bluster.

The main place I've seen this kind of rhetorical strategy before is in polemics from British Trotskyist sectlets, like the Workers Revolutionary Party. Maybe we should be told the late Corin Redgrave's line on Glasgow song culture.

BTW I rather doubt Ronnie Browne wrote the tune for "Roses of Princes Charlie" (which is the good bit of the song). Any earlier sightings of something similar?