“…Six of Laird's songs were subsequently included in Child's corpus 14 . In a comparative analysis of Agnes Lyle's (another Kilbarchan singer) and Agnes Laird's versions of ‘The Cruel Mother’, Flemming Andersen noted distinct differences in the progression of the women's respective ballad narratives, noting how the singers employed the same traditional ballad narrative tools to produce ‘very different renditions, each with their own individual focus (which, we may speculate, may in some way reflect the two singers’ different tastes, personalities, and world views)’ (Andersen, 2014). Andersen finds, for example, that Laird's version is characterised by an emphasis on the psychological development of the ‘cruel mother’ of the ballad title.…”