> The first is from Lena Harmon and Hattie Presnell

Hi, Richie. Yes, it's a beautiful version. Up there with the best. I've never seen what Lena Harmon sang before, so I'm grateful to you for posting it, but I recognized her name because I found interesting her comments on what the ballad meant to her, which I came across in Christine A. Cartwright's article "'Barbara Allen': Love and Death in an Anglo-American Narrative Folksong" -- quoted there from Thomas Burton's book "Some Ballad Folks", so if you know Thomas Burton, this will not be news to you.

There's probably more in the book, but from what Cartwright quotes, it looks as if Lena Harmon puts the blame pretty firmly on Barbara, who "caused a lot of this by her pride and stubbornness" because "she didn't think that she loved this boy". But she concludes: "I think it shows that love is stronger than death," which seems to nicely sum up the paradoxically satisfying effect of adding the true lovers' stanza about the rose and briar stanza at the end of a ballad that on the surface seems to be about refusal of love.