As fond as I am of Child ballads for lo these five decades or more, I don't recall hearing "Earl Richard" until this week. Possibly I'd heard other version of it that didn't suit me and so didn't stick in memory, but I quite love this Sean Garvey rendition. I wasn't familiar with him, either, and am sorry to find he died earlier this year, and also to find that his recordings mostly don't seem available for purchase.
This is a slow, repetitive, pretty, sad, hypnotic tune. What a nice burr Garvey had in his lower register.
It's an interesting fact about Scottish songs that it's just about as often that the woman murders the man in the murder ballad as otherwise.
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