"Jim, the last verse is an add-on from The Douglas Tragedy."
Hi Q
I'm afraid that, having spent a fair amount of time examining the song tradition in relation to our having carried out 40 years of field work among various communities, a few of them still alive and creating songs, I still find myself an extreme agnostic in the matter of song origins, particularly in attempting to attribute them to literary sources.
The way Mrs Murphy sang it is very much in the Ulster Scots tradition - I remain unconvinced that the verse can be attributed to one or other of the ballads.
Jim Carroll