Lord Randal's "true love," for reasons unknown, does a Lucretia Borgia number on her young suitor and the result is one of the classic ballads.

Back in about nineteen-ought-fifty-seven, a friend of mine and I took a class together at the University of Washington English Department, "The Popular Ballad," taught by Dr. David C. Fowler. The term paper was a doozy. Research a ballad and get together as many versions as you can find. My friend chose "Lord Randal." He turned up either full texts or references to over 1,013 different versions of the ballad!

He found one American version which had been rewritten as a propaganda song for the dairy industry. Little Jimmie Randall had been inadvertently poisoned when his girlfriend fed him oleomargarine instead of real butter!

But the real lulu was—believe it or not—"Billie Boy." He goes to visit his girl friend and she doesn't poison him, she feeds him cherry pie. Which she had baked herself, "quick as a cat can wink its eye." The sad part is that "she's a young thing and cannot leave her mother." Yup. It's a variant of "Lord Randal."

Or the ballad "The Three Ravens." How about eliminating the dead knight, the hounds, the hawks, the fallow doe and all that stuff and have the three ravens all fly down to the local Burger King?

Barbara Allen goes to see Sweet William, who is pining away for her to the point that the poor sod is dying. Instead of turning up her nose and walking out, how about she rips off her clothes, jumps into bed with him, and humps him to death? He dies anyway, but when they bury him by the old church tower, he has a smile on his face.

Yeah, great idea! Let's give them all a happy ending!

Don Firth