When, sometime in 1825 or 1826, a Scottish ballad and song collector and editor wrote a heading in his collecting notebook titled ‘old singing women’, he was doing two things: first of all he was reminding himself of possessors of songs whom he had met or become aware of; many of them were women, so many in fact that he could provide a list. But the phrase also implicitly carries a wider assumption, that is, that women were somehow connected with this form of vernacular literature, perhaps not to the exclusion of men, but certainly in profusion. This chapter takes William Motherwell's words as text and will seek to explore both the general and specific relationships of women to balladry and song, most particularly those examples which have circulated orally, bear certain stylistic marks of that mode of transmission, and which exist, invariably, in multiple versions.

Antiquarian collections of ballads and songs began to appear in Scotland with considerable regularity towards the end of the eighteenth century and continued to be an extremely popular publication item well into the first half of the nineteenth. It may well be, as David Daiches suggests, that such antiquarian endeavours began as discrete, acceptable, and positive forms of nationalism. Most editions of ballads included texts, often prefaced with laudatory remarks about the nature of this presumably Scottish form of literature. Seldom was there any music, seldom were critical questions raised, except in passing. One issue often alluded to was the question of authorship and the related one of origins. Where did this material come from? Who created it? When? Why? The texts were thought to be old. Some enthusiasts were sure that they had been created by minstrels, perhaps first as romances later ‘broken’ down into the narrative songs called ballads or alternately, first as ballads, then developed into romances: ‘Hind Hom’/‘King Hom’ (Child 17) being the prime exemplar of this approach. And the texts were thought to contain some ineffable essence of Scottishness, a quality that merited particular attention during a period of seemingly headlong Anglicisation, as in the words of Peter Buchan: