It is convenient to refer to folksong collections by the names of the collectors rather than those of the contributors but this means that, while James B. Duncan and Gavin Greig willingly acknowledged their great debt to Duncan's sister, Mrs Margaret Gillespie, to Miss Bell Robertson from New Pitsligo and their other contributors, the scholars are still better known than the sources whose voices have been subsumed into the collection. The collection (3,050 song texts and 3,100 tune records) compiled by Greig and Duncan in Aberdeenshire between 1904 and 1917, is indebted to a long list of informants but the most prolific correspondents were women like Bell Robertson, Margaret Gillespie, Annie Shirer and Margaret Harper.

Before the twentieth century, collections focused on tragic and historical narrative ballads, culminating in Francis J. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, completed in 1898, which brought together all the principal manuscript records of narrative ballad stories and, in doing so, established its 305 texts as a standard reference point. Singers’ voices were thus lost in other ways: significant parts of their repertoires were ignored and little information was gleaned about any actual performance. Greig and Duncan were in some ways ahead of their time, for they recorded whatever the people sang and found a rich brew of lyric songs, shanties, work and bothy songs, Irish songs, music hall songs alongside ballads and narrative songs taken from broadsides and chapbooks or linked to older traditions through the process of oral transmission.

Their most prolific respondent, Bell (Isabella) Robertson (bom 1841), is reckoned to have contributed material for almost 400 songs. From her earliest girlhood she demonstrated a passionate interest in songs and avidly sought out new songs and variants. She also took an active interest in dialect and the conservation of Buchan terminology and proverbial sayings. A neighbour noted that she was ‘a perfect mine of local traditions, and many a tale she told me and my children of smugglers and pirates, and strange happenings in days gone by, which have never found their way into print’.

It is perhaps significant that her audience was a domestic one made up of women and children. Towards the close of her life she summed up her family role in a way that will still find an echo with many women: ‘I was the eldest of five, and the only girl.