Hugh Shields has emphasized the degree to which oral rather than printed transmission has dominated the Irish song tradition, instancing the lack of printed sources for many of the older British ballads that have been found in Irish oral tradition, a fact which he believes reflects a cultural ‘tendency to place less reliance on alphabetic aids’. In support of this observation, however, he cites ‘Sir James the Ross’ (Child 213), a ballad that seems to have been introduced into Ireland initially via an 1826 Omagh songbook. The song was subsequently recovered from oral tradition in 1975 in the same location in a form so close to the 1826 text that, says Shields, the two ‘must be linked by an initial act of straightforward literal memorization’. Whether an older, orally transmitted song or an eighteenth-century printed one, it uses all the devices of the classic ‘ballad of tradition’. The ballad of ‘Sir Hugh’ (Child 155) appeared in the polite 1776 Irish-printed anthology Charms of Melody, as did a polished version, ‘with little traditional character’, of ‘The Grey Cock’ (Child 248), which nonetheless ‘can be recognized as the main influence on an oral version from North Antrim sung in 1975’.