Hi,

I'm going to start providing information about the opening stanza(s) of this ballad. Ed Cray in his article "Comment on the Words" further categorizes the ballad by the placename, Barbara's lover's name and also the time of year (May, Martimas etc.). Following are several paragraphs from Cray's article:

Conjecturally, the oldest texts are those which begin: "It fell about a Martinmas time /When the green leaves were a- fallin'." These "Martinmas" versions , more specifically the traditional Scottish variants represented by Child C, may contain a legacy motif where in the dying lover leaves Barbara a series of gifts, including a bowl of his heart's blood. (Child thought the legacy mean stuff and did not print an available text which contained it. No "Martinmas" texts were found among the AAFS recordings available for this study.

Two other variants of the "Martinmas" group are less old: Child A, which in spite of a lively history in print has rarely been collected from oral tradition; and a Forget-me-not Songster text, identifiable by the hero's offer to make Barbara mistress of seven ships This latter variant has entered oral tradition in the United States - a tribute to the popularity of the songster which reportedly had multiple press runs in the 1840's totaling one million copies. The Child A text, from Allan Ramsay's Tea- table Miscellany, seemingly has been most reprinted in those literary collections of "olden ballads", which rarely were distributed among the folk; the Forget-me -not Songster, on the other hand, was aimed at the mass, and therefore the folk, market.

[Cray's article confirms the postulation by Riley 1957 that there are few or no traditional texts based on Child A. Although covering the "Martinmas" there is no mention of additional texts with the "fall" setting.

Richie]