“The Knoxville Girl” is an Appalachian murder ballad. It is derived from the 19th-century Irish ballad “The Wexford Girl”, itself derived from the earlier English ballad “The Bloody Miller or Hanged I Shall Be” (Roud 263, Laws P35) about a murder, in 1683, at Hogstow Mill, 12 miles (19 km) south of Shrewsbury. This ballad was collected by Samuel Pepys, who wrote about the murder of Anne Nichols by the Mill’s apprentice Francis Cooper. Other versions are known as the “Waxweed Girl”, “The Wexford Murder”. These are in turn derived from an Elizabethan era poem or broadside ballad, “The Cruel Miller”. Possibly modelled on the 17th-century broadside William Grismond’s Downfall, or A Lamentable Murther by him Committed at Lainterdine in the county of Hereford on March 12, 1650: Together with his lamentation., sometimes known as The Bloody Miller. The first commercial recording (by Arthur Tanner) was made in 1927, but the song dates to the 1683 murder of Anne Nichols/Nicholas by her lover Francis Cooper in the village of Hocstow, England, (what is now Hogstow). The English Broadside Ballad Archive in California gives the victim’s name as Anne Nicols and the date of the publication of The Bloody Miller as 1684; it was collected by the famous diarist Samuel Pepys.