Hi Bruce, Hi Malcolm. I've sung this song with great glee for some years. By the last 'piece o' flesh' none of the listeners are much interested in any greater length to it. The ultimate of the bloody Scotish ballads.

MacColl gives no source in Blood and Roses but I've traced down his sources any number of times to find them word perfect & legit. That is, even when the version or line is so unusual or contrary you're sure he's "improved" it or erred, he didn't - it's legit. In my experience, anyway. The big thing I have to question is the frequency with which one or the other of his parents just happened to transmit the only extant tune for a Child or other ballad.

But his comments to it are great:

A death in the family is a common ballad feature and the instruments of death are fairly common as well: the knife, the axe, the stake, the pistol, the noose, all take their toll. Sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces kill each other by stabbing, shooting, de-capitating, drowning, smothering, strangling and poisoning. There is something off-beat about having one's nephew torn to pieces by wild horses but, as Professor Child has observed, 'the last two stanzas are unusually successful'."

I agree.

Bronson offers nothing at all, in the main text or the appendix. But he'd closed his cannon in 1972, seven years before B & R came out.

Sorry, Kim-lin - no help. Maybe it's in Greig~Duncan, though.