"Was Barbara Allen only ever sung to one tune?"
There are alittle short of 200 variants of Barbara Allen in Bronson and dozens of different tunes
It was common practice with broadsides to either not give a tune to to pick one that was flavour of the month at the time
The practice was continued right into the mid 1950s in Ireland by the Ballad sellers
A traveller we recorded had three tunes and sets of words to it
The 'died for love' theme is as old as literature itself - it would be peculiar if there were no earlier versions that Pepys's
Jim Carroll