Talk:Matty Groves

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[edit] Wording

"...a man kills his wife and her lover after finding her sleeping with another man." Isn't this worded a little awkwardly? It seems to read as though the wife was caught sleeping with another man other than her lover. Surely it should read something like "a man kills his wife and her lover after finding them sleeping together." John1701 01:03, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

--Yogyog 07:59, 23 October 2007 (UTC)Yep, that sounds better.

I can't help feeling that there's a version of Matty Groves somewhere where the sex scene is described as graphicly as the fight scene.

I can't citate this, but I think Matty Groves comes from a tradition of ballards that are the historical equivelent of cheap, sensationalist news-papers: full of sex and violence and only vaguely based on true events.


If there is a more graphically sexual version of this song, it would hardly be very suprising. As you mentioned, ballads were once similar to our sensationalist news publications, and in fact copies of these ballads were once sold on the streets as newspapers later would be.

Also, since Matty Groves is one of the Child ballads, it is likely that Child edited the song somewhat after collecting it, in order to "clean up" the lyrics a bit.

Many similar traditional songs were ostensibly much more obscene and explicit in their content, before being collected by such scholars as Child, Sharp and others. John1701 14:48, 24 October 2007 (UTC)