"Lizzie Wan", also known as "Lizie Wan" or "Lucy Wan" is a traditional narrative ballad. It appears in F. J. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads as #51 and in the Roud Folk Song Index as #234. It is a murder ballad with strong similarities to "Edward" (Child #13) where there is a murder and the murderer makes up several versions of events to defend himself. Probably because the subject of the ballad involves incest, the ballad is not well known in either print or tradition. It was collected in the Southern Mountains from only one informant by Cecil Sharp in 1917. It was latter collected by John Jacob Niles in 1933. In both cases, the singers were men.
In The Ballad Book, Niles writes:
Although the situation involved in this ballad is not unknown to the country people of the Southeran Appalachians, the discussion of the subject matter would be avoided. Certainly the women would neither discuss it nor sing it. The only text Cecil Sharp encountered was sung by a man, Ben F. Finlay of Manchester, Ky. My informant was also a man. In all my years of collecting I have never heard a woman even refer to the ballad of "Lizzie Wan".
Both of the collected American versions omit the murder and the son's confrontation with his mother. I have completed the story with verses from some English versions.
It was printed in Bronson's The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (1959-1972), Bronson's The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads (1976), Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917), Herd's Ancient & Modern Scottish Songs (1869), Niles' The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles (1961) and Vaughan Williams & Lloyd's The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959).