There were a number of reasons why I stopped adding material from the Penguin Book at this point. Partly, I discovered who holds the copyright to the bulk of the material (and before anyone starts objecting that "traditional" material shouldn't be copyrighted, I'll just mention that around half of the texts in the Penguin book were re-written by Lloyd and Vaughan Williams from various sources, not always acknowledged, and therefore aren't , strictly speaking, traditional at all) and that, if they were nagged for long enough, there was a good chance the book would be re-published; this has now been agreed, though I don't know how soon it will happen.

The other reason was that I knew that the Irish collector and scholar Hugh Shields had published a study of this particular song, and that he took a very different view of it from the rather romantic one that so many people assumed in the wake of the recording (in 1951; more than once) and publishing of Mrs. Costello's set; I didn't want to comment until I had the full background.

It was some time before I had a chance to read Shield's paper, The Grey Cock: Dawn Song or Revenant Ballad?, which appeared in Ballad Studies, ed. Emily B. Lyle, 1976. Essentially, he makes the point that The Grey Cock is not traditionally a supernatural ballad at all, and that the supernatural elements in Mrs. Costello's set (including a verse omitted from the Penguin book) were borrowed from a broadside song popular in Ireland during the 19th century, Willy O; examples of which Shields has himself recorded from traditional singers in the North of Ireland. Her song, however, appeared to supply a "missing link" that a great many people had been earnestly hoping for; as a result, like Piltdown Man, it was instantly accepted into the canon without too much thought; it took time before someone was prepared to step back and re-assess it objectively.

Of course, that won't stop people making sweeping assumptions that all night-visiting songs are ghost stories (I've seen it happen here all too often), but such folk rarely allow facts to get in the way of cherished romantic fantasies. They also insist that She Moved Through the Fair is a traditional ghost story, though no traditional version of it is any such thing; so far as can be told, my dead love was introduced to that song in the 1920s by the popular recording artist John McCormack; quite possibly by accident in reading from sheet-music.

I don't have any distaste for anybody's fondness for the supernatural; you should see my bookshelves! What I want for traditional music, though, is accuracy and proper information, not romantic (and all too often, ill-informed) assumptions. Lloyd was far from being ill-informed, but he was a man of his time (and not always as scrupulous as he might have been) and promulgated quite a bit of misinformation in the course of an illustrious, if confusing, career.