[1984:] Sheila MacGregor learned this song from her mother, Belle Stewart, who some thirty years ago heard an old ploughman sing it while tattie-lifting near Blairgowrie. His version started with v. 2 above ... so Belle made up the first verse herself and inserted it, partly as an opening to the song and partly to provide a reason, a provocation, for the man battering his wife, viz. she'd married him for his money. [...]
Even today the age-old practice of wife-beating persists, and "The recent laws helping battered women ... do not apply here [i.e. in Scotland] limited though they are for England and Wales." I once heard a policeman say, when confronted with an injured wife (a total stranger, she had flung herself into my car to escape from her husband), "Of course we don't know what she did to annoy him". If comparable injuries had been inflicted in a fight between two men, the verdict would have been "grievous bodily harm" with no excuse of provocation. But sometimes the only way people can react to ugly facts is to joke about them, and [this] is obviously in this genre. [...]
Jean Redpath comments that this is the only Scots song she knows of in which a woman is shown to be drinking: "... and this fact certainly doesn't reflect the truth!" (Munro, Revival 120)