Pretty Peggy and the Bonnie Lass : 250 Years of Folk and Commercial Transmission of a British-American Folk Song

“Pretty Peggy O†is a British-American folk song. You might be familiar with it via the Grateful Dead - who performed it live 265 times - or via Bob Dylan - who recorded it on his debut album - or via some other typical folk revival recording like those by Simon & Garfunkel or Joan Baez. In my comps, I looked at all of these versions, as well as 65 other commercial audio recordings of “Peggy,†and dozens more versions in a variety of formats, dating back to the 1780s. The goal of this project was to understand the interaction of “Peggy†with various historical commercial markets over the last 250 years. Since 1782, the song has been performed, rewritten, and adapted hundreds of times. It has mostly been performed in the UK and the U.S., in different accents, dialects, modes, and meters, under different titles, and with varying rhyme schemes and verse lengths. The first known “field recordings†of this song were made in the late 19th century—at first by anthropologists interested in artifacts of thriving “folk†communities, and later by musicologists hoping to preserve the vestiges of a quickly disappearing culture of oral transmission. In the early 1960s, folk revivals on both continents created a commercial market for folk songs, and the variants of “Peggy†that these folklorists had collected became popular source material for commercial folk artists