Thanks, Jim. My point was not there's anything wrong with MacColl's "SPS," but quite the opposite: that as it is, IMO, the finest known version of the song in both text and tune, its very excellence might suggest to some that it is actually the "ur-text," miraculously preserved for at least two hundred years with scarcely a change.

That would surely be wishful thinking.

The secondary point, which is more relevant to Richie's "Barbara Allen" project, is that it isn't easy to determine just when and how a presumably orally transmitted version of a song came into existence. The crucial early evidence is usually lacking.


And just to put it on record before it slips my mind:

Some would claim that MacColl's "SPS" would be "inauthentic" if he, as a literate student of balladry, put it together himself - even if some of it came from his father, a lifelong traditional singer. But undoubtedly like his own sources, William Miller made conscious changes as well (putting a new tune to "Calton Weaver," for example). Some alterations may even have been influenced by print. In this case, I'd say that whatever MacColl may or may not have done to his father's song or fragment, the result would still be in "the tradition," since MacColl (unlike Lloyd) grew up with such songs - and his "SPS" is stylistically indistinguishable from both the bulk and the best of them.