Bessy (or Betsy) Bell and Mary Gray were two bonny lasses, and they may even have been historical figures, but the plague came from yon borough town and slew them both regardless. And thus was created a most romantic and picturesque place of pilgrimage.

Bessy Bell is also a tune and we take a look at it's surprising history, from being scrawled in a book of sermons to the part it played in the heyday of a theatrical phenomenon.

The tune we sing today isn't the traditional one; a quite different tune accompanied this song for a couple of hundred years. And yet there's a far better tune lurking in an old broadside, and I'm giving it a world premiere as the tune for Bessy Bell and Mary Gray.

Music
Instrumental version of Betsy Bell and Mary Gray (trad)
Betsy Bell and Mary Gray in the style of Maddy Prior and Martin Carthy
Harp improvisation
Bessy Bell tune (trad)
Go To Bed Sweet Muse (Robert Jones)
Bessy Bell to the tune of A Health To Betty (trad)
Beggar's Opera Overture (Johann Christoph Pepusch)
'Twas Within A Furlong of Edinburgh Town (tune from Playford but sometimes attributed to Henry Purcell; words quite possibly by D'Urfey, arranged by Jayne Morrison)
Betsy Bell and Mary Gray - full song (trad)

FX from Freesound contributors djangoaltona, inchadney, boodabomb and bruno-auzet

References

Francis James Child (1904) English and Scottish Popular Ballads https://archive.org/details/englishscottishp1904chil/page/n13/mode/1up 

Letter written by Major Barry: http://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/arch-scot/article/view/168/166 

Highland Notebook, Robert Carruthers: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CZsHAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 

Bertrand Harris Bronson (1976) The Singing Tradition of Child’s Popular Ballads: https://archive.org/details/singingtradition0000bron 

Fourpence Halfpenny farthing, from A Pepysian garland : black-letter broadside ballads of the years 1595-1639, chiefly from the collection of Samuel Pepys (1922) https://archive.org/details/pepysiangarlandb00pepyuoft/page/322/mode/2up 

Bessy Bell from Orpheus Caledonius https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/91483447 

Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes: https://archive.org/details/oxforddictionary0000opie/page/n9/mode/2up

Julie Bumpus (2010) BALLAD OPERA IN ENGLAND: ITS SONGS, CONTRIBUTORS, AND INFLUENCE: https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1276055885&disposition=inline

Miscellaneous works of that celebrated Scotch poet Allan Ramsay: https://deriv.nls.uk/dcn23/1056/7480/105674805.23.pdf

Edinburgh Literary Journal, 1829 https://www.proquest.com/openview/f7929bf2f574263f/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2773