ABSTRACT
Greig's most important contributor was Bell Robertson, who provided him with just under four hundred items of folksong. She received most of her ballads from her mother, a well-known singer in Strichen; others she picked up from an aunt, a girlfriend, a tinker-boy, and a blacksmith she heard at a meal-and-ale. It is worth remarking that both Nicol's and much of Bell Robertson's ballads come not only from the same regional folksong tradition, but even from the same village folksong tradition. Bell Robertson, besides being a reciter of folksong, was also a poetess in a minor way. Her verses were mainly poems of conventional piety, as might be gathered from the passage written with such unselfconscious condescension by Mrs Frank Russell of Aden:5
and
(xxxix: 243) (Ii: 21, 41, 61)
(lxxi: 121) (Ixxxviii: B 154 )
(lxxxi: C14)
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