It was written by Cunningham based on the extant versions and is not traditional.

Sorry I missed this earlier; I was alerted to it earlier today by email & my initial response was to just let it lie, but the more I think about this idea of and is not Traditional so the more it vexes me. I'm sure my email correspondent will forgive me if I use my earlier reply to form the basis of this post (and I'm sure, if he wants, he might add some other fascinating glimpses on the subject of Cunningham).

As far as The Traditional is concerned, I still prefer George Mackay Brown's John Barleycorn to any of the so-called Traditional versions of the song, and this is certainly the case with respect of Cunningham's Corbies which is a far more toothsome piece than Scott's (and I've never much liked the An Arlac'h setting that many now think of being Tradition in itself). I feel 1825 has a hoary ancientness about it; it is very much Pre-Folk / Pre-Revival and chimes in heartily with the literary Balladry that proliferated at the time. Look at (say) Bell's Rhymes of the Northern Bards, which remains my earliest source for The Collier's Rant, a song I've never seen any 'folk processed' variations of, but was deemed significant enough to be included in that context, as well as in Crawhall's later Buek o' Newcassell Sangs (1888) with other material by known authors working in The Idiom at the time. So...   All songs were written by someone, and just because we know who wrote them doesn't make them any less Trad. - it just makes them anon.. Think of George Bruce Thompson's epic McGintine's Meal an Ale, the text of which was quickly assimilated into the both Grieg and Duncan Collection and the repertoir of such singers as Davie Stewart; think also of Tommy Armstrong & the other poetic song-makers whose muse is rooted deep in The Tradition, as oppose to the Idea of a Tradition, howe'er sae nebulous that Tradition may be - all the more so for the inclusion of such material.

As for Cunningham's Corbies, I've been singing it (to my own tune) for 25 years now thinking the text was anonymous. After all, all texts are anonymous until we find out who made them, or remade them, so do we think of this text as being folk processed or not? And why not? As I say, it's a vexing question not without easy answer unless one proceeds with the usual lines of Cultural Apartheid on which the Folk Revival is predicated as being a harvesting of the unlettered authentic by the very lettered paternalistic academia. However so quaint that notion may be (and however so sincere its exponents over the past century and more) I can't help but feel that the more one delves, so the more complex it gets, not just in terms of the material, but the philosophical approach of what we can consider as being Traditional and what we can't.