ABSTRACT
The great lengths to which scholars and singers alike have gone in relation to 'Edward' provide good evidence of a compulsion to find motivations for characters and to realise a coherent ballad story. Among singers in east Suffolk, Ginette Dunn found a similar preference for 'truthful' songs. A similar story of seduction occurs in a similar place in another song collected in Scotland, and printed probably in the north-east of England, 'The Bonny Bush of Broom'. The cruel murder of a neighbour's daughter committed by the eponymous protagonist of the seventeenth-century broadsides on 'The Downfall of William Grismond' takes place in a field of broom, after he has had sex with her there. Talking birds of various kinds are common enough in folklore at large; among the relevant motifs are the Bird of truth, Bird reveals murder, Bird betrays woman's infidelity, Birds tell a secret, Murder discovered through knowledge of bird languages, so on.
