Hi, TY Joe. That's good, I make a bunch of silly typos!!!

Lighter- certainly this is conjecture. I assume you don't agree with Dolph in Sound Off! NY, 1949, who says that the song was well known in Colonial America and that the tune was borrowed for "Sergeant Champe," a long ballad about an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap General Benedict Arnold.

My theory about the date: The ballad would have to be known in Scotland (Child A) and England (Child B) to be brought over. If Pepys date of 1666 is correct, we can assume the ballad was in fact sung then by Mrs Knipp, the actress, and others. The broadside date can be assigned c. 1690 (Bruce Olsen) so we can assume the ballad was circulating in the British Isles from the mid to late 1600s.

Virgina, the main repository of the ballad in North America (Riley 1957) had its governing body (House of Burgess) in place by 1619 and certainly by the date 1690 when nearly 100,000 settlers were in the region, there's a good chance the ballad was present.

Certain ballad families, like the Hicks family show that the patriarch Samuel Hicks (2nd or 3rd generation in US) was born c. 1695 in Goochland, Virgina and that he and his children carried the ballads into NC and later Beach Mountain, NC before the Revolutionary War. That these ballads which include Barbara Allen have remained there isolated since that time and have spread to different family members is provable.

Richie