Sometimes these flawed notes will be a request for help, as the project has evolved over decades and includes some readings, as well as material from radio and TV, that I didn't always properly document at the time.

1 In the January '02 issue of The Atlantic Monthly ("Mr. Goodbar Redux"), Cristina Nehring reviews a collection of dreary "dating books" and comes to the conclusion that "there is a space -- nay, a cry -- for intelligent reappraisals of romantic love. What we have instead is fearful repetition of romantic cliche . . . The great minds of the moment steer clear of the great questions. . . . The dearth of commanding commentary gives audience to idiots."

Now I don't know that my commentary is "commanding" but it surely doesn't give audience to idiots, and I am indeed challenging readers, especially female readers whose initial reaction to my words may be intensely negative, to rethink some received feminist wisdom. It needs a woman, I think, to defend from the "inside" the contradictory feminine role that fuels a whole erotic realm, and if some women read that defense as a betrayal of "sisterhood," I can only say that I have brothers too. . .

1 As Brownmiller explains, "She is unfit for the contest. Femininity has trained her to lose. . . She has been encouraged to value soft skin, a slender wrist, a smooth unmuscled thigh and leg . . . Her clothing hampers free movement by design, and fragile materials add to her vulnerability. One yank and her blouse is ripped. One stumble and her stockings are torn. Her skirt allows for easy access. One gesture, one motion, and she is humiliatingly exposed. Her flimsy shoes have straps that break and heels that come loose. She cannot run." (p. 360) She cannot run? As advertisements in the popular media once portrayed her, if she was unmarried and didn't have a "date," she could scarcely dare move from the phone! On a more up-to-date note, it seems curious that women's clothing should be blamed for both "hampering" and "exposing" -- while the kilt, essentially a masculine "skirt", should be worn to this day by many Scotsmen as a practical garment for physical activity (the father-in-law of a friend I was visiting donned it for digging in the garden). And Brownmiller paints a humiliating picture, too, when she complains of the "psychological edge men hold in a situation characterized by sexual aggression." As she goes on to say (p. 402), "It is no wonder, then, that most women confronted by physical aggression fall apart at the seams and suffer a paralysis of will. We have been trained to cry, to wheedle, to plead, to look for a male protector, but we have never been trained to fight and win." As if it took special training in the martial arts not to "fall apart at the seams"? As if men, rather than women (as I myself have always assumed), indeed held this "psychological edge"?

2 My University of Pittsburgh instructor who made the comment -- "Clearly, Brownmiller sees most women as social cripples in a sense which only drastic healing arts can save? Is she being too condescending, or are you not being condescending enough?" -- was a young man. I'd like to think that most women would not be so comfortable with his notion of necessary condescension to them.

3 I think the comment was actually provoked by a paper ("The Rhetoric of Arrogance") on an article in Omni by psychologist and elective single mother Afton Blake, whose preference for the "Nobel sperm bank" over ordinary conception clearly hasn't had the impact of Brownmiller's "rape book,." But if Against Our Will struck a popular chord, its author can scarcely be called a deep thinker. As I quickly came to see, she wasn't my real target, and neither was "feminist" thought, which comes in many thought-provoking shapes and sizes.

4 Brownmiller popularized the phrase, which as she acknowledges, was first used by Wilhelm Reich in the opening chapter of The Sexual Revolution.

5 This interview was conducted Sept 15, 2000 on PBS: see www.theconnection.org/archive/2000/09/0915a.shtml.

6 A "strange response," as Shalit concedes, "but then I wasn't really prepared for such a conversation." I agree with Shalit that the professor who initiated this conversation was out of line; but I am still struck by her avoidance, throughout the entire book, of the word "provocative." For her, it is a clearly pejorative one.

7 I must have been simplifying the chorus to a French-Canadian version of "A la Claire Fontaine": "depuis l'aurore du jour je l'attends, celui que j'aime, que mon coeur aime; depuis l'aurore du jour je l'attends, celui que mon coeur aime tant" (or "since the dawn of the day I await him, him whom I love, whom my heart loves; since the dawn of the day I await him, him whom my heart loves so much"). Not that it needs simplifying; the proper words are easy to sing and almost hypnotic.

8 Thus, we hear from Andrea Dworkin that "heterosexual intercourse is the pure formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies" and also "Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake -- it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it"; from Robin Morgan that "rape is the perfected act of male sexuality in a patriarchal culture"; from Ti-Grace Atkinson that "the institution of sexual intercourse is antifeminist" and also that "love is the victim's response to the rapist"; from Sheila Jeffrys that "when a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression" . . . . These are probably not the most up-to-date expressions of the suspicion with which some educated minds have come to view women's "collaboration" in strong heterosexuality; I welcome reader input on the topic.

1 This version of the ballad is very close to Child's single text from Buchan (and the north of Scotland, circa 1828). Since Buchan's tune was never recorded, however, for years the ballad was only sung in an English version collected by Cecil Sharp (Bronson calls it a "somewhat enfeebled imitation of the other" and I incline to his view -- but would like very much to hear the Sharp version as sung by Nancy Thym on a recording that has only recently come to my attention). After A.L. Lloyd adapted the Buchan text to a new tune and recorded it in 1966, both text and tune were adopted by Tony Barrand and John Roberts on the Folk Legacy LP "Dark Ships in the Forest" (I first heard "The Two Magicians" sung on this LP), by Martin Carthy and doubtless many others.

2 This comment of Rika Ruebsaat's came as part of her intro to "Si Tu Te Mets Anguille," in the course of a Vancouver B.C. folksong retreat. I have not discussed with her "The Twa Magicians" but assume it was the "rape ballad" she meant.

3 My identification, whenever possible, of this and other ballads with Child's scholarly system of nomenclature does not mean that his collection is my original source (very few people can have learned ballads from him, especially as in Child's day it was not thought necessary for collectors to include tunes). Nor does it mean that I am restricting my range of material to these scholastically pre-approved, as it were, "Child ballads," which in any case have often undergone considerable textual change. It's simply a useful way of identifying a great many old ballads that masquerade under many different names and different forms. Moreover, while his texts are rarely my point of departure, they may well add an instructive historical perspective and even elucidate (as in "The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter") a much muddled ballad plot.

4 In an encouraging (long lost) email Tony Barrand says that he and his partner had been "accosted many times with the 'rape song' argument after singing 'The Two Magicians' . . . we don't sing it much any more." He goes on to say that in "certain audiences it can strike the wrong mood," and I suspect those audiences are especially to be found on college campuses where political correctness reigns.

5 I have no idea when this battered songbook came into my hands -- perhaps from the family bookshelf? -- but I seem to have always "known" the song. I never cared to sing it, though, in part because of what has always seemed to me an awkward chorus line. The "reborn" Buchan version sings much better, I think, but seems even less of a song that I can sing (though I might change my mind on this score if I heard Frankie Armstrong's recording of it....)

6 Orwell is not seeking to romanticize these Yorkshire miners but to dramatize their terrible conditions of employment. As he continues: "In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look of them whether they are young or old. They may be any age up to sixty or even sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all look alike. No one could do their work who had not a young man's body." (p 33)

7 As an NPR program (which I have not succeeded in hunting down) described these excursions, they sounded like safe exercises in a titillating voyeurism -- an impossible gulf separating the well-dressed Londoners and the bared bodies of men (and women, working at the mine surface too) who simply could not afford to wear superfluous clothing that would quickly get torn and dirty....

8 I say "mystique" because there is indeed a certain romantic element here -- a glamorizing of the oppressed, i.e., of "victim peoples" like the Celts -- but there is also the demographic fact that the Labor party is strongest (and unemployment most widespread) in northern England and Scotland.

9 "She logged the icon for a chat in Birmingham UK, while he logged on in Canberra half a world away," begins "The Two Webmasters" by Howard Kaplan of Toronto, Ontario. The full text of his witty adaptation (which, not unsurprisingly, loses the story of an intensely physical conquest) is available at http://www.thrinberry-frog.com/SongSheets.htm#TheTwoWebmasters

10 Paddy Graber of Surrey, B.C. tells me that the 102-year-old Mrs. Brown was very reluctant to sing these "improper" verses; she only sang them to his wife, Phyllis, who had become a trusted friend.

11 Daphne Patai ("Gamesmanship and Androcentricism in Orwell's 1984": PLMA, October, 1982) also takes a power-laden "value system" and "a belief that power is important to a sense of manhood" (p.866) to be fatal weaknesses in Orwell's writing, in proof of which "wrong values" she cites a passage from his earlier novel Coming up for Air:

And it's a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can't catch you, and to chase rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It's a kind of strong, rank feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it's all bound up with breaking rules and killing things. The white dusty roads, ... the stamping on the young birds, the feel of the fish straining on the line -- it was all part of it. Thank God I'm a man, because no woman ever had that feeling. (p.52)

I draw a rather different conclusion from this passage, faulting the speaker only for cutting women out of "that feeling" of raw animal power -- a feeling which doesn't strike me as "wrong" at all, for I recognize it. I've had it, even if I never participated in the savagery that does indeed have a peculiar small boy flavor. So I didn't join my brothers in hurling snowballs at a helpless grebe (its feathers to iced for flying) that fell into our backyard. "What monsters," I thought, yet they grew up into decent men, as Orwell did too. In this novel written shortly before the start of World War II, the middle-aged man remembering the first time he was allowed to tag along with the "gang" is also a man deeply fearful of fascism and its "boot in the face" evil power -- an entirely believable character with whom Orwell clearly identifies (though the degee to which he identifies with that slam at women is debatable.)

12 I have been advised that "romance" is a loaded word for many liberated women -- one I shouldn't use because it conjures up all the wrong images of female fragility and weakness. That isn't what it conjures up for me, however, and I'd like to liberate a word which still seems right to me because there is an ideal storyline here. In other words, I'm still talking the stuff of dreams...

1 "Sexual Silences in Feminism," a conversation between Amber Hollibaugh and Carol Moraga, in included in Powers of Desire: the politics of sexuality, ed. Snitow et al.

2 "The Misunderstanding" by Newton and Walton is included in Pleasure and Danger: exploring female sexuality, ed, Carole Vance.

3 I read these reviews at the time -- have tried unsuccessfully to retrieve them on interlibrary loan.

4 I finally read the book and am struck with Rand's vision of power, generally, as an instrument of contempt and degradation; sex, with her, is "politicized" out of all erotic feeling.

5 "It is no exaggeration to say that among all living creatures only man, because of his prehensile appendages, is capable of rape in the full meaning of the term." And this peculiarly human sexual violence, "perhaps accompanied by wooing and caresses," Deutsch goes on to say, gradually came to be accepted by women as sexual enjoyment. Or as she puts it, "The powerful embrace of the prehensile arms, combined with the defensive counterpressure, induced strong pleasure sensations in the woman's entire body." (Deutsch, II, pp. 222, 223)

6 La fonction de la pastourelle dans la po�sie lyrique du Moyen Age est d'exprimer le d�sir charnel d'�tat pur, d'autant plus libre de toute codification, de toute id�ologie, de toute spiritualisation qu'il s'adresse � une cr�ature sans �me, ou consid�r�e comme telle, qui ne peut donc �tre qu'un pur objet �rotique.

7 The phenomenon is also dramatically illustrated in 18th-century French literature. In Les Liaisons Dangereuses Laclos shows Mme de Merteuil to be furiously and justifiably jealous of the virtuous Mme de Tourvel. For Tourvel's unwilled, indeed actively combatted, sexual feeling for the marquis (Merteuil's co-conspirator) evidently makes her far more attractive to him than he's willing to admit -- and what galls the "professional coquette," more attractive than her. So she taunts the marquis with "loving" the other woman, dares him to send her a letter (which Merteuil herself dictates) disclaiming in unmistakably cynical terms any real feeling for her . . . and Mme de Tourvel expires. . .

8 Still looking to recover this early, extremely polemical writing of Atkinson's.

9 In Uses of Pleasure (vol. 2 of his History of Sexuality) Foucault probes the classic Greek "problematization" of this erotic relation; "on the one hand, young men were recognized as objects of pleasure ... no one would ever reproach a man for loving a boy, for desiring and enjoying him, provided that the laws and proprieties were respected. But on the other hand, the boy, whose youth must be a training for manhood, could not and must not identify with that role." (p 221) Or again, "he was supposed to refuse, resist, flee, escape. He was also supposed to make his consent, if he finally gave it, subject to conditions...' (p 224) The proprieties of "a boy's honor" in this "courtship" situation though never spelled out are assumed to be common knowledge. So Aeschines orates against a political opponent for having "prostituted himself "as a boy; the problem, says Foucault, was "not that they [Athenians] might be governed by someone who loved boys or who as a youth was loved by a man; but that they might come under the authority of a leader who once identified with the role of pleasure object for others." (p 219)

10 As Ong puts it, "the adversative structures of truth are not lethal or even hostile, but life-giving, though at some cost" (Fighting for Life, p. 33). I would add that the fondness of academia for these "adversative" (or "dialectical") structures reflects their very power as tools of disciplined thought; and, yes, there can be a cost to their use.

1 Les Liaisons Dangereuses exploits this spectre to the full with the marquis' coldly calculated rape/seduction of an easily intimidated young girl. I hear echoes of a very different game, though -- a fundamentally "fair" one, which isn't necessarily restricted to the drama of embattled virginity either -- as Debbie McClatchy sings a jaunty chorus to her "Don't Come Home a-Loving with Venison on Your Truck":

While you're out hunting, baby,

My life gets much too tame,

So while you're out hunting, baby,

I'm going to be fair game.
The song is, of course, a warning to hunting season husbands (and might be said to confirm medieval ideas about the "terrible lust" of married women!) But the singer's intention "to be fair game" and yet (I think it safe to assume) to be no man's foregone sexual conquest also suggests an uncloistered female self-confidence essential to the "pastoral game." That this confidence may not always prevail (and may not fit the situation) makes it no less key to the applauded myth.

2 I cannot but feel the critical praise heaped on depictions of sexual violence, like the current interest in "extreme" (i.e., extremely dangerous) sports, to be a perverse inverse reflection of empedestaled social values. That is to say, we preach a kinder, gentler world even as we watch Anthony Hopkins eating his victims' body parts, mandate "zero tolerance level" safety standards even as we go jumping off higher cliffs, surfing bigger waves, kayaking ever wilder water...

3 Benjamin's "Master and Slave: fantasy of erotic domination" is included in Powers of Desire: the politics of sexuality.

4 I did not get the name but he (or she) evidently agreed with Brownmiller that women's "conscious rape fantasies" are indubitably masochistic, indubitably modeled on the classic Story of O "and its dreary catalogue of whips, thongs and iron chastity belts" -- that while "fantasy is important to the enjoyment of sex," it is indeed "a rare woman who can successfully fight the culture and come up with her own non-exploitative, non-sadomasochistic, non-power-driven imaginative thrust." (Brownmiller, p. 324)

5 From Der Fl�tennmusikant, pp. 56-7:

1. Guter Mond, du gehst so stille durch de Abendwolken hin, bist so ruhig und ich f�hle dass ich ohne Ruhe bin. Traurig folgen meine Blicke seiner stillen, heitern Bahn; O wie hart ist das Geschicke, dass ich dir nicht folgen kann.
2.Guter Mond, dir will ich's sagen, was mein banges Herze kr�nkt, und an wen mit bittren Klagen die betr�bte Seele denkt! Guter Mond, du kannst es wissen, weil du so verschwiegen bist, warum meine Tr�nen fliessen und mein Herz so traurig ist.
3. Dort bei jenem kleinen Tale, wo die dunklen Bäume stehn, nah bei jenem Wasserfalle wirst du meine Hütte sehn. Geh durch Wälder, Bach und Wiesen, blicke sanft durchs Fenster hin, so erblickest du Elisen, aller Mädchen Königin.
4. Nicht in Gold und nicht in Seide wirst du dieses M�dchen sehn, nur im schlichten weissen Kleide pflegt mein M�dchen stets zu gehn. Nicht vom Adel, nicht vom Stande, den man sonst so hoch verehrt, nicht vom eitlen Mode-Tande hat mein M�dchen seinen Wert.
5. Nur ihr Reiz, ihr gutes Herze, macht sie liebenswert bei mir, gut im Ernste, froh im Scherze, jeder Zug ist gut an ihr. Ausdrucksvoll sind die Geb�rden, froh und heiter ist ihr Blick, kurz, von ihr geliebt zu werden, halt ich f�r das gr�sste Gl�ck>
6. Mond, du Freund der reinsten Triebe, schleich dich in ihr K�mmerlein; sag es ihr, dass ich sie liebe, und das sie nur ganz allein mein Vergn�gen, meine Freude, mein Lust, mein alles ist, dass ich gerne mit ihr leide, wenn ihr Aug in Tr�nen fliesst.
7. Dass ich aber schon gebunden, and nur leider! zu geschwind meine s�ssen Freiheitstunden schon f�r mich entschwunden sind; und dass ich nicht ohne S�nde lieben k�nne in der Welt. Lauf und sag's dem guten Kinde, ob ihr diese Lieb gef�llt?

6 Michel Zink, elected Professor of the College of France in 1994 (Professor at the Sorbonne previously), is a medieval scholar, exciting to read for the connections he makes, especially in his untranslated monographs on the chansons de toile and the pastourelle. (Already translated is his Enchantment of the Middle Ages).

7 Recapping the past century of medieval scholarship on his election to the College, Zink doesn't mention Prof. Jones; apparently The Pastourelle: a study of origins and traditions of a lyric type made no waves among European medievalists.

8 From Society and Culture in Early Modern France; this is of course the philosophically purer position, but Davis doesn't take it to be a superior one.

9 Badinter's argument in L'Amour en Plus (trans. as Mother Love, Myth and Reality) that the sudden popularity of breastfeeding among fashionable Frenchwomen was a step backwards for the cause of women -- a retreat to cozy domestic enslavement -- took me aback, especially as I share her antipathy to Rousseau and never imagined I was following his dictates when I fed my babies in the simplest possible manner. (Of course, upper class 18th-century ladies had the even simpler option of handing their babies over to another woman.) Badinter persuades me that Rousseau made "natural motherhood" the more fashionable option, that it indeed became something of a cult and that a byproduct of this cult, the spoiled, attention-grabbing child, became a social problem in the eyes of less-than-besotted visitors well before 20th-century America. She does not persuade me, however, to see breastfeeding as enslavement.

10 Cooper's Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance covers a vast range of material, much of it scarcely germane to my topic except insofar as it illustrates the confusion of the term "pastoral." Cooper's focus, moreover, even with the pastourelle itself, is on what she evidently sees as a "higher" form of the thing -- what I and, I think Michel Zink, see as "subjugated" forms (i.e., subjugated to Christian morality in the aftermath of the cruel Albigensian crusade). Hence her comment on this "best known genre of medieval shepherd literature, the pastourelle," which "in its simplest form," she adds ("as the lyric where the first person narrator, usually a knight, asks a shepherdess for her love, either successfully or, perhaps more characteristically, to his discomfiture"), "scarcely counts as pastoral at all." In other words, it isn't the complex "pastoral image" which according to Cooper "offered a way of expressing Christian man's highest aspirations and keenest longings"; but perhaps it isn't all that simple either.

1 In his notes to "Songs of Rob Roy and the MacGregors" (companion to the CD), Carl Peterson tells us that Rob Roy, a.k.a. Robert MacGregor Campbell (he "used the name Campbell, due to the proscription of the name MacGregor") "grew up as a drover or cattle trader, and became a wise and experienced dealer, whose successful speculations often benefited himself and his friends. . . In 1712, due to sudden market depression and the loss of 1000 pounds (often attributed to an imprudent confidence with a partner named MacDonald) Rob Roy was left nearly destitute. The Duke of Montrose felt cheated and Rob's property was taken and his stock and furniture were sold. With little choice Rob began his lawless life. But Rob Roy had little trouble finding friends and followers. . .

"Rob Roy avoided unnecessary bloodshed and cruelty whenever possible. His schemes of plunder were well designed and were generally successful. Like Robin Hood, of England, Rob Roy took from the rich and was generous to the poor. He was known as benevolent and humane 'in his way.' Rob lived a long life and died in his home, in Balquhidder, in 1734."

Lending weight to Peterson's perhaps less than impartial words, Arthur Herman (How the Scots Invented the Modern World, pub. 2001) says that in 1603, after a quarrel with the leaders of the MacGregors, James VI "in effect sentenced the entire clan to death."
"It was genocide, pure and simple. Within the year more than thirty-six men had been murdered or executed . . . The clan was steadily driven from its home in Glen Strae and Glen Lyon into a life of permanent exile and banditry, regularly hunted as renegade by all the other clans in the region. One hundred fifty years later the proscription against the MacGregor name still stood. . . . In fact it was not until 1774 that it was finally stricken off the statute books." (p 107)

2 "We may easily believe that as Scott says, the imagination of half-civilized Highlanders was not much shocked at the idea of winning a wife in a violent way. . . . It is certain that Jean Key did not receive the sympathy of all of her own sex. A lady of much celebrity has told us the it is safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion, and there were there were those in Jean Key's day, and after, who thought it mere silliness to make a coil about a little compulsion. 'It is not a great many years,' Sir Walter Scott testified, "since a respectable woman, above the lower rank of life, expressed herself very warmly to the author on his taking the freedom to censure the behavior of the MacGregors on the occasion in question.'" (Child, vol. IV, p 224).

3 For the fuller story see Scott's 1829 Introduction to Rob Roy (available on line here) which Child ackowledges as a prime source for his own commentary.

4 This account comes from Consider an Island, as told to Linda Williamson by Rhona Rauszer in a digression from the larger story about Big Donald Angus' clever oldest daughter Cairistiona -- "quite a different kettle of fish" from her mother:

Besides she was easy on the eye, not like the old bag Rebecca, his wife. Mind you, she too had been a bit of a humdinger in her day . . . he had had an awful job getting her, in fact. She was of good family, you see; instead of her bringing him a dowry of six or seven head of cattle, he'd had to go and fight for her -- capture her and bring her away -- for nothing. She had lived on a smaller island some miles off and was already bespoken of by her cousin, who was a handsome young laird. So naturally she was preparing a very fine dowry working night and day at her spinning wheel.

Then one dark night while out netting the mouth of his rival's river, Big Donald Angus suddenly thought it would be a good idea or ploy to sail right close up to the island and help himself to the lot. The cattle. Well, the calves would have to do. He only had a forty-two foot boat and nine men, but he could manage to take the hens and bed and bedding all right, and the dowry chest and of course not forgetting the desirable Rebecca herself. Oh, and the spinning wheel!

It was an enterprising venture requiring guerrilla-like strategies, especially when they sighted the young laird's boat coming round the headland straight for them. He had a bigger boat than them, mind you, and twenty men at his disposal. The battle that ensued was worse than the Armada itself. What a stramash! Servants, cattle, hens and furniture were all floating about on the tide. Big Donald Angus grabbed ahold of Rebecca by the feet and slung her over his shoulder; he managed to shove a young piglet under his oxter [armpit] at the same time, and one of his men got the spinning wheel. It was all they could do in the circumstances because they were well outnumbered, after all.

5 I am indebted to Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World for a keen analysis of Scottish history and a debunking of some much romanticized aspects of Highland culture. As he tells us (p 108, in the chapter "A Land Divided"), "the cattle raid, the creach, was not only a test of leadership and honor, celebrated in bardic song. It also paid a tidy profit, when the clan could charge ransom to return the stolen cattle. The term in Scots was blackmail -- mail being the word for "rent" or "tribute" [or, in this case, "ransom"] and black being the typical color . . . Blackmail determined the rhythm of life in many parts of the Highlands. Some observers estimated that at any given moment the average chief had half his warriors out stealing his neighbor's cattle, and the other half recovering the cattle his neighbor had stolen from him." (In other words, it wasn't the "value added" mercantile system of the south. Small wonder that merchants in Glasgow and Edinburgh were strong supporters of the 1703 Act of Union, reviled though that act was by crowds in the streets and popular feeling which in songs like "A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation," and in stirring lines like "we are bought and sold for English gold," lives on to this day.)

6 Child sees this exchange of words, as reported by Jean Key to her friends, to be a "mitigating circumstance" that evidently wasn't considered in Rob Oig's trial. "The jury, in James's trial, brought in a special verdict with the intent to save his life, but no such effort was made in favor of Rob Oig," he says, leaving us to wonder just what lay behind the "special verdict" -- perhaps James' charisma as a man of "extraordinary hardihood"? In any case, as a married man (with fourteen children, Scott tells us), "Big James" was clearly ineligible for the role of bold abductor; happily less encumbered, the younger brother was also happily (for ballad purposes) endowed with the illustrious name.

7 Peterson says he first found this song in "Ten Songs of the MacGregors," collected and edited by Forbes MacGregor. "But the book contains only lyrics, with some notes about where to find the tunes. As to the tune, the notes say it's from R.A. Smith's "Scottish Minstrel" (1821) . . . but I'm not actually sure if that is where I got it. . .

"I don't normally sing this song [it is however on his CD]. Although if someone requested it, and I had the lyrics with me, then I might give it a try. I haven't heard anyone else do this song." In other words, it goes virtually unsung.

8 As Rauszer continues the family story -- grown in the telling perhaps and artistically enhanced in the mouth of a born storyteller? -- "Now the funny thing is, Rebecca wouldn't speak to him [Big Donald Angus] after that for a long, long time, not until three of their children were born in fact. He began to think she was dumb. Then one day she found her old spinning wheel up in the loft and thinking herself alone, she began to sing. Big Donald Angus heard her and was delighted. There were seven more children born after that." (Consider an Island, p 60)