>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,"

I admit to being skeptical, simply because like so many amateur editors and collectors Dolph can not be expected to avoid presenting reasonable conjecture as bedrock fact.

It would be perverse to insist that "BA," first reported in 1666 and later seen to be possibly the most popular Child ballad, was *not* "well known" in America by 1780. But perhaps it was revived through extensive broadside printings in the 19th century? Perhaps it was known but not "well known"? We simply don't know.

What we *do* know is that "Sergeant Champe" goes very well to the *meter* of "BA." That doesn't mean it was sung to the same tune, or that it was intended to be sung at all.

What we know also is that the the earliest discovered appearance of "Champe" in print (source unknown) is in Frank Moore's "Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution" (1856), Dolph's most likely source. Moore asserts that "Champe" was "sung very generally, at home and in the camp, during the last years of the Revolution."

But since the country was awash in patriotic verses about the Revolution right through the Mexican War and beyond, the late appearance of "Sergeant Champe" suggests that the possibility that it was actually a 19th century creation - perhaps written to commemorate the fiftieth (or seventy-fifth) anniversary of Champe's exploit. (More conjecture, of course.) I can find no evidence in various huge databases to support Moore's claim of its antiquity and popularity.

The point is that we since we don't know if the author of "Sergeant Champe" was tapping his toe to the melody of "Barbara Allen" while he wrote, *and* we have no proof that "Champe" existed before the 1850s, we can't use it as evidence that "Barbara Allen" was "well-known in Colonial America."

Perhaps it was, but "Sergeant Champe" cannot be used to prove it.