My latest album-in-progress involves finding a collection of folk songs based around tragic romances - hence the name "dead lovers."
While part of my interest lies in a kind of grim amusement of how common this type of song always has been, I'm also noticing how fascinated people have always been by "true crime" tales and "reality" stories.
For most of the upcoming recording project (which I'll be starting on soon, I've got a bit of gear to acquire in the next few weeks and then I'll be putting down basic tracks), I'll be focusing on songs from the 1800s, However, it's worth noting that the tradition of Dead Lover ballads is alive and well in modern music as well.
Songs like "Last Kiss," and "Leader of the Pack" adapted the tradition of the departed loved one to the popular music of the 1950s and 1960s, becoming their own genre known as "Teenage Tragedy Songs." The genre waned in popularity by the late 1960s but never quite went away. While a number of these modern songs describe death in battle (particularly in more patriotic offerings), by disease or by drug overdose, the number one killer of sweethearts in songs of the past half-century or so seems to be the automobile.
It's not surprising, as the cars became more common and accessible in the latter half of the 20th Century, traffic fatalities rose steadily, only declining relatively recently. Car crashes were, and still are, one of the prime killers of healthy young people, and carry with them the shock of suddenness and reflect the dark side of the independence that a car offers to teenagers. All pretty dramatic psychological stuff!
This week's song does center around a motor vehicle, but it actually outlives our protagonist.
"1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is a song by Richard Thompson off his 1991 album "Rumor and Sigh." It tells the kind of story that should be familiar to aficionados of all sorts of Dead Lover ballads: a brash young outlaw is in love with a red-haired maiden, but he is mortally wounded in a caper gone wrong and only has time to profess his love for her and offer her a token of his eternal devotion before breathing his last.
The twist, of course, is that it's set in the modern(ish) day, and young James dies of a shotgun blast to the chest during an armed robbery near London, and the "token" he leaves behind is his beloved motorcycle.
Thompson chose that particular vehicle to include in his modernized ballad in particular because of it's rarity and fame. The Black Lightning was the fastest production bike in the world when it was made, and only 30 of them were built in 1952, it was equivalent to the magic sword or elfin steed of earlier stories. It was also distinctly British, which was important to Thompson in setting this particular song in his home country.
It's a wonderful song and it's been covered beautifully by far more worthy artists than myself, but it's well worth picking up the album or listening to a live rendition by the man himself (he's a seriously brilliant guitar player, not just a great songwriter)
It may just be true that nothing beats a '52 Vincent and a red-headed girl.
In 1851 an Anglican preacher by the name of Charles Kingsley published a poem based on recollections of his childhood in Clovelly, a small coastal town in southwest England mostly populated by herring fishermen and their families. Of course, Kingsley likely had many sunny summer afternoons enjoying the salt air of the seashore, but we're talking Dead Lovers songs here, so his poem was obviously not one of that sort.
Instead, Kingsley recalled a day "when the old bay lay darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts stalking across the waves before the northern gale," and the local fleet of tiny herring boats fleeing before the storm trying fruitlessly to make their way between the waves and the rocky coastline while the fishermen's families watched helplessly from shore. "Corpse after corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child," he said, "till in one case alone saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those who had gone out the night before."
As an adult, Kingsley became a priest and author and was involved in the Christian Socialist movement. He was an advocate for the rights of the working class and for protecting them against abuse and exploitation by the wealthy. After being chastised for preaching on the topic, he recalled the dangers and hardships faced by the poor fishermen he knew in his youth, and wrote his famous poem, "Three Fishers." It was set to music shortly thereafter, and became a popular Victorian parlor song. At some point it entered the folk tradition, with the help of Canadian musicians Stan and Garnet Rogers, has become popular again with a slightly different melody than its original setting.
The phrase "Men must work and women must weep," became something of a catchprase in the Victorian labor movement. At the time, of course, many of the most dangerous jobs, including commercial fishing, mining and factory work were done almost exclusively by men (though the pre-union era wasn't exactly a safe time for working class women either), and their wives had to face the possibility that the man they loved and counted on might be killed or crippled at any time, leaving them and their children to face starvation and homelessness.
The song is perhaps so moving because, rather than focus on the struggle of the men caught in the storm, it focuses on the helplessness of those left on the shore. The wives sit up at night keeping the lighthouse flame going with some degree of determination, but you get the sense as "they looked at the squall and they looked at the shower" they knew there was little hope. To me the most chilling line in the whole song is "for the sooner it's over the sooner to sleep." It's a reminder that for these people, poor working class families, there's no gracious period of extended mourning, but yet another day full of chores and tasks ahead of them, children to feed, a house to manage, now made infinitely harder with the loss of a husband. There may be a little sleep to be had when the crying is done, but there will be no rest.
This isn't a song about wealthy women pining away for their suitors or knights bravely dying for love, but people facing a hard and storm-lashed existence, yet still trying to love and support each other. When they're gone all that's left is the moaning of the wind across the sandbar.
Some Dead Lover Ballads feature lovers who were slain in warfare, or found a violent end. In most of these cases the story focuses on the surviving lover grieving for their lost partner and taking a pretty passive "woe is me" stance which is typical of the ballad genre. However in this case the young man narrating the story reacts to the killing of his sweetheart with a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
"The Wind That Shakes The Barley" (Roud 2994) is one of those ballads for which we actually have a known author. It was written by poet and scholar Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830-1883) in 1861 about the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798. It tell of a young rebel who is trying to tell his sweetheart that he plans to leave her behind to fight in the rebellion. As they're talking, however, a British (or loyalist militiaman) shoots her and kills her. The young rebel then joins the rebel forces at the Battle of Oulart Hill as they slaughtered a small detachment of the British Army.
The young man then goes on to state that it's more likely than not that he'll be joining his love in the afterlife soon enough. Cheerful stuff!
The history of the many rebellions and the ongoing conflict between the Irish and British colonial rule is long, complicated, and far beyond the scope of a single folk music blog post, but to touch very briefly on what was going on in the 1790s, well, the British were being pretty terrible.
To grossly oversimplify, at the time, anyone Catholic (which included the vast majority of native Irish) had their rights severely restricted. They either couldn't own or were very limited in what land they could have, had not right to public office or to the vote, and were mostly ruled over by a small upper class of British protestant landlords. Around that time the few Catholics with any influence and Protestant sympathizers pushed for better treatment and more representation. They had some success, but achieved nothing near equality and that frustration, along with the influence of the more successful revolutions in America and France, stirred up a rebellion against the British.
France was supposed to lend military support, but various circumstances and crossed signals led to a lot of failures. And in response British forces in Ireland responded with tactics that would make even today's "tough on terror" crowd blanche. British forces burned homes and murdered those suspected of supporting the rebellion, and used torture methods such as half-hanging and pitchcapping (look them up if you want to, but they're not nice things, trust me) to attempt to extract information or (more likely) to intimidate Irish citizens.
In the days leading up to this particular battle, British militiamen burned a number of homes and killed civilians all around the Wexford area. The narrator's sweetheart may have been fictional, but her fate was very much based on real events. Once Irish forces had massed, though, they greatly outnumbered the British, and by holding the high ground and having set up an ambush near the battle lines, they killed almost all of the British troops.
Other encounters during the short-lived uprising didn't go so well and by the autumn of that year the rebellion was over, though resistance to British rule would continue at various level of intensity until the Republic of Ireland had formed in the 20th Century, and beyond in Northern Ireland, which is still under the flag of the United Kingdom, a fact which not everyone who lives there is entirely thrilled about (though, like I said, I'm not going to even try to tell that whole story here).
One important, but easily overlooked bit of symbolism, though, is worth noting. The Irish rebels were sometimes called "Croppy Boys" for their close-cropped haircuts. Often the Irish who were killed in battle, or executed as prisoners would be buried in unmarked mass graves, which were nicknamed "Croppy Holes" A lot of these men carried rations made up of barley grains with them, and after a time the grains that were in the pockets of the dead men would sprout from the ground of the Croppy Holes, which the Irish took as a symbol of how their resistance to British rule would rise, again and again, no matter how many times it was cut down.
The wind through the barley isn't just an example of a pretty rural setting for this story, it's a powerful symbol for a movement that continued beyond the end of our Dead Lovers, and into the modern day.
Most of the characters in the songs I've covered are fictional, or are, at the very least, only very loosely based on real-life characters. However, real people do suffer the losses and heartbreaks that the characters in these songs and stories do, and sometimes they are moved to express themselves musically.
One such case was the famed Scottish fiddler and composer Neil Gow, who lived from 1727 to 1807. Gow was married twice, first to Margaret Wiseman, who bore his eight children (including his son Nathaniel Gow, a noted composer in his own right) and after her death to Margaret Urquhart, whom he remained with from 1768 until her death in 1805 (Margaret is a pretty common name in Scotland).
When Margaret died, Gow was an old man who had outlived two wives and all but two of his own children. In this tune we can hear not only the sadness of losing his companion of half a lifetime, but some sweetness and playfulness as well. It's a fitting memorial, and it speaks volumes without a single word.
There's a special bond between siblings. Brothers and sisters may fight and squabble, but when it's all said and done, they're your closest friends and allies and you know they'll always have your back.
Except those times when they'll straight up kill you, as is the case in this week's Dead Lovers Ballad, "The Cruel Sister," (Roud 8, Child 10) also known as "The Twa Sisters," "The Bonny Swans" and a bunch of other names.
In this version of the song there are two sisters who live in some remote home by the North Sea. They're visited by a knight who comes a-courting, paying attention to both sisters, but clearly favoring the younger. The older sister, unable to bear the idea that her younger sibling might be married off before she is, tosses the girl into the ocean to drown.
That's when things get weird.
The younger sister's corpse washes up on a beach somewhere and is found by some wandering minstrels. Instead of running off to the authorities to report the a dead body or even just giving the girl a decent burial, they cut up her corpse and make a harp out of it, and string it with her hair (in some versions they use finger bones as tuning pegs or other gruesome details). They take this bone-harp to the wedding of the older sister (who, after offing her competition apparently gets that knight to propose pretty quick) where it suddenly begins to play itself, and somehow tells the story of how the bride murdered her younger sister. In this version that's where it all ends, though some versions tell of how the murderess is executed (pulled apart by a mill wheel, hanged, etc.).
This is an old ballad, dating back to at least the mid-1600s, but with connections not only to other musical renditions, but to many prose stories as well and in several languages. In the musical versions, the siblings are often sisters, but in the story versions, they may be brothers as well. Many versions describe the dead girl as floating "like a swan" in some way, or tie swans into the imagery of the story somehow, In the well-known Loreena McKennitt version, the swan imagery is repeated in between the lines of narration, while the version I played (which is a fairly modern take based on a version from Old Blind Dogs, which is based on a version from Pentangle) uses "Lay the bent to the bonny broom" which originally comes from another, even older song, "Riddles Wisely Expounded," (Child Ballad Number 1! Roud 161) which also lent elements to a popular folk ballad which was famously recorded by Simon and Garfunkel as"Scarborough Fair." There is some debate as to what laying the bent to the bonny broom actually means, but it seems to be some sort of good-luck incantation, or ward against evil (or it may just be a fancy way of saying "go lay yourselves down in the long grass and get it on," a distinct possibility in any song, folk, pop or other). This form of refrain, a repeating line that has little or nothing to do with the narration of the song's story is referred to as a "burden," which derives from the French bordoun, or drone, as these lines add a kind of repetitive accompaniment to the lines of exposition.
The idea of an older sister being bitterly jealous of a younger sibling marrying before her is not that far-fetched, after all, even many close siblings suffer from jealousy and resentment on occasion, and it's still considered a bit socially awkward, in some circles at least, to be an older, unmarried sibling while your younger brothers or sisters are happily married off. Add to this the dim prospects in some historical time periods for unwed women (or women in general, but slightly less so for those with a well-to-do husband) and the remote location of the family's holdings making potential suitors few and far between, and you've got a recipe for a good old-fashioned murder ballad.
Now, about the creepy minstrels. While there is some lore associating musicians and bards with pre-christian religion and all sorts of druidic tradition, I think this falls more into the camp of "grateful dead" folklore. "Grateful Dead" stories are classified in the Aarne-Thompson index (the folk tale equivalent of the Roud and Child indices) as tales about a ghost with unfinished business who somehow rewards a living person who helps them resolve that business (and yes, that's where the band The Grateful Dead got its name). The minstrels in this case are acting as agents of the dead girl and bringing her sister to justice. I'm not sure what, exactly, the musicians get out of this, although maybe they get to keep the harp. A harp made out of bones is probably pretty cool. I don't think it would sound very good, but it'd look impressive anyway.
This week's song is not technically a Dead Lover ballad the way that I happen to know it, however, in its most famous form, it definitely qualifies.
I learned "The Maid Freed From The Gallows" (Child 95, Roud 144) from The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles, but there are many, many versions found not just in the English-language tradition, but across continental Europe as well, dating back to at least 1770. The Roud index lists more than 300 entries for the song and they all tell basically the same story, though there are two different possible endings. It appears under a variety of different names, including the above-mentioned "Maid Freed...etc, etc" as well as "The Hangman," "The Ropesman," "The Gallows Tree," "The Prickly Bush," "The Sorrow Tree" and others.
In the song a young woman is about to be hanged, and asks the hangman to delay just a bit, as she sees someone coming who may offer a bribe if he'll spare her. Each person who shows up, usually a family member, arrives empty-handed until finally the condemned woman's lover arrives with the requisite bribe of gold to save her from her fate.
Some variations change the condemned to a young man, and yet others shift the perspective to the third person, telling of a devoted daughter or wife trying to save their father or husband. In these variations the woman will often sleep with the hangman in order to dissuade him from killing their loved one. Sometimes it works, but other times the hangman both takes the bribes and has sex with the woman, but then hangs the prisoner anyway.
Such is the case in probably the best-known of the variations, "Gallows Pole" as recorded by Led Zeppelin on their 1970 album Led Zeppelin III. Jimmy Page first heard the song on a recording by 12-string guitar pioneer Fred Gerlach (whose version was in turn based on that of his friend Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter) and adapted for the band.
In this version the friends of the condemned show up but are "too damn poor" to offer anything to save him. The prisoner's brother then shows up with some silver and "a little gold" to bribe the hangman. The prisoner's sister then arrives and he asks her to take the hangman off to "some shady bower" and persuade him to let her brother go. The hangman takes a look at everything on offer and still laughs at the prisoner and pulls the lever to drop him to his death.
The better known versions are pretty sparse on information on just why the protagonist is about to be hanged. In the Ledbetter/Gerlach version it seems to come down to race and class discrimination, and the very believable idea that authorities in some places would threaten to hang a man for petty crimes as a way to extort money from his family and friends. In older European versions however, it seems that there's a fairy-tale logic of the maiden having lost a golden ball or other precious object and is condemned as punishment.
Another interesting explanation is that the young woman was captured by pirates and was being held for ransom, with the threat of hanging used to encourage her family to pay up. Apparently back in the day ransoming prisoners was big business during wartime, and profitable for pirates during times of relative peace.
A final possibility that I've come across is that the"gold" stood for the young woman's virtue (ie, her virginity) and as young woman who may have been branded immoral, or possibly even pregnant out of wedlock she may have been doomed because of it until her lover stepped up and offered to redeem her by marrying her. I'm not a fan of this one, personally, because first of all it smacks a kind of icky puritanism that I'm not very fond of, but mostly because it would seem uncharacteristic of a genre of songs which happily deals in murder and adultery. Moralizing over a woman's virginity seems pretty dull compared to the possibility of pirates.
Before I start in on this week's post, I'd like to give a shout to another group who does real justice to a classic Dead Lover ballad!. Valentine Wolfe has just released this most excellent version of "I Am Stretched On Your Grave." I've been fortunate enough to perform at a lot of the same events as these two, and they're both great musicians and lovely people.
As you may recall, I mentioned this song in my post about "The Unquiet Grave." VW's version is very reminiscent of the Dead Can Dance rendition of the song, and is well worth a listen.
OK, now that you've enjoyed something haunting and beautiful, let's talk about syphilis!
Syphilis, as we know it today is a serious but easily treatable disease in the developed world, and is, of course, spread largely through sexual contact. When it first appeared in Europe sometime in the 15th Century though, it was much more virulent and nearly impossible to treat. Eventually by the time this week's song started to appear in the 18th Century as "The Unfortunate Rake (Roud 2), physicians had been having some luck treating it with "White Mercury" (mercury chloride), leading to the title of this Scottish variant known as "Pills of White Mercury."
The downsides of treating anything with mercury is that while it will kill off the bacteria causing the disease, there's a very, very good chance that it might kill the patient as well. At the very least, these chemicals had some pretty severe side effects which were often confused or closely associated with the effects of the disease. And the mercury treatment was most effective in the early stages, when the infection was pretty localized (it involves open sores in sensitive spots, do yourself a favor and do NOT go looking for images of it) and the patient otherwise healthy. Hence the "had she but told me of it in time."
Penicillin is awesome.
The song has many variants, and several different melodies, but one of things that ties them all together - and sets them apart from other Dead Lover songs - is the frankness with which it treats its subject matter. Not only is it addressing the issue of sexually transmitted disease, but it's pretty honest about how gross the lingering death caused by some of those diseases could be ("give each of them a bunch of red roses/so when I pass by ye won't know the smell").
I think it's that very frankness that has made the song so popular over the years. It's a bit transgressive to talk openly about sleeping around, which of course makes it memorable and interesting (just think about all the folk songs about drinking and fighting, bad behavior makes good entertainment). It can also be viewed as a bit of a cautionary tale, "don't be like me, or you'll meet a sorry end rotting away in a hospital," or as an old saying went, warning about casual sex in the pre-antibiotic days, "a night with Venus leads to a lifetime with Mercury." On the other hand, it's made pretty clear that if the young man's partner had let him know that she'd picked up a souvenir of her own dalliances, things probably would have been OK, so the moral may actually be "please consult a reliable physician if you think you may be ill or suddenly develop open sores on your private parts dear lord what is wrong with you people?"
In fact, this song is nearly a parody of some of the more sentimental "dying of disease" ballads that populate other corners of the Dead Lovers world. Usually the disease in question is some "ladylike" disease such as consumption (tuberculosis) that leaves the sufferer romantically pale and faint, but doesn't have the nasty outward manifestation that something like syphilis does. Plus these diseases don't require any intimate contact, leaving the image of the sufferer as fragile, innocent and virginal as they're carried off to heaven like they angel their lover knows them to be. Syphilis, by contrast, is pretty gross and was associated with loose morals and casual sex (or outright prostitution).
So "good" lovers pine away and die without ever doing more than innocently touching hands, "bad" lovers die an uglier death, but the bawdy song tradition says, "hey, at least they got to have a little fun first."
Interestingly, in the American West, this song evolved in a totally different direction (well, not totally, the dude still dies). It became a cowboy ballad called, among other things, Streets of Laredo (Roud 223650), and tells the story of a young man dying not of disease, but of a gunshot wound. Now, cowboys were not known for being particularly prudish, and sexually transmitted diseases were absolutely an issue reported among prostitutes and their patrons in the frontier towns of the Wild West (though by the early 1900s, reliable treatments that were less likely to kill the patient than to cure them were becoming available), so I suspect that the change was less due to concern about the salacious nature of the original and more due to a desire to "freshen up" an old favorite, and to make it fit into the gunslinger mythos which was popular at the time. At the same time, it's still a cautionary tale of bad behavior, as the young victim acknowledges he's "done wrong" and fell into wicked ways which led to his demise.
Now, I don't know if "Pills of White Mercury" will make it onto the final Dead Lovers recording, not because I'm squeamish about the subject matter, but because I've recorded a good version of it already with Baroque & Hungry! Still, it's a staple of my live shows and has just enough gory detail to make it fun.
It's no secret that I do most of my "research" on the internet these days. I'm not a professional music scholar by any means, and don't get to travel around to study the archives of various university libraries, nor do I get to wander the hills with a tape recorder searching for yet-unknown variants of traditional songs.
But in spite of my rather sedentary life here in South-Central Wisconsin, there wonderful resources available online for serious and semi-serious folk song researchers. I've sung the praises of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library archive before, which houses the Roud database which gives me a lot of reference numbers, and there is the archive at Mudcat Cafe, which has been an active web-based forum for nearly as long as there have been web-based forums (since the mid-90s). There are other university archives available free online as well as any number of personal or professional sites that document these sorts of things, and quite a few traditional songs even have Wikipedia pages with high-quality links and references. For some reason, lots of people who play centuries-old music on acoustic instruments were among the early adopters of the whole internet thing, so folk music is pretty well represented in the Digital Age.
But, in spite of all the information available for online folk music study, and the ease of natural language search engines, it can be incredibly hard to track down information on a song if you don't know the right questions to ask.
This was a problem with this week's Dead Lover ballad, "The Two Soldiers," an American song from the Civil War era. It's been recorded several times in the past few decades, notably by David Grisman and Jerry Garcia and by Bob Dylan, but background on it seemed to be pretty scarce.
The song tells the story of a pair of Union soldiers moments before what would turn out to be a disastrous assault on a Confederate position. One asks the other that if he is killed, that his companion will relay his love and the news of his death to his sweetheart. The other replies that he will, and asks that in the case of his own death his friend bring the news to his poor mother. It shouldn't surprise anyone who's been following this blog to learn that they both end up dying, so neither Ma nor The Girl Back Home will get the message.
It's a pretty predictable story, with our Dead Lover (and a Dead Son) dying nobly in a doomed Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade style disaster, but it left me with a few questions. Was it based on any sort of true story, or at least a specific battle? When did it first appear? Who wrote it? And, interestingly, why does it seem to start not just in the middle of the battle, but in the middle of a conversation?
My usual opening move of typing the song title into Google turned up nothing but links to other recordings of the song, and a search for "Two Soldiers" in the Roud index turned up every song about either soldiers or two of anything, but I didn't see the particular song I was looking for (it turns out it was buried in the pile, but far enough down the list of results that I didn't see it in my first round of searching).
So I switched tactics and searched by the first line, "He was just a blue-eyed Boston boy," which is what gave me my first break. Instead of finding news stories about soldiers and a million songs about soldiers, I was able to find the specifics of the song I knew and wanted to learn about. One of the most interesting things I found was in an article from a 1997 edition of Inside Bluegrass magazine that told the story of how, exactly, the modern version of the song got its strange "middle-of-the-action" start. When the song was collected (by noted folk song scholars Alan and Elizabeth Lomax) the recording was split in two parts and stored in the Library of Congress archive. In the 1950s, Minneapolis musician Willard Johnson was building up his collection of old-time songs and, thinking the first call number listed in the archive was just introductory material, ordered a copy of the second half of the song. Other musicians picked up on his version and it became the regularly performed one.
Once I was able to find the rest of the lyrics, I learned that the song was, in its original form, often known as "The Last Fierce Charge," and was able to find its Roud number (629!) and a list of many, many variations. I also learned that the song derived from an anonymously published poem first printed in Harper's Weekly on February 7, 1863, and it was set at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
The battle, fought in December of 1862, just months before the poem was published, was a messy defeat for the U.S. Army. Union forces led by General Ambrose Burnside fought against entrenched and well-fortified Confederate troops led by Robert E. Lee. The "hill" referred to in the song was an elevated area called Marye's Heights on the west side of town where the Confederates had dug in. Union troops made multiple, unsuccessful attempts to take the hill and were forced back each time with heavy casualties (including, in the poet's imagination at least, the pair in the song). The loss shook confidence in the U.S. war effort and caused repercussions all the way up to Lincoln.
But the song isn't about the political ramifications or even much about the battle itself (it could have been set almost anywhere), but about the personal impact on a couple of the combatants. This is another peculiarity of American folk song. I mentioned earlier that songs from America, even if they were directly drawn from British or Celtic sources, tended to remove any mention of the supernatural. In the same vein, American folk songs are strangely reluctant to talk about the specifics of war.
The Scottish, based on their songs, can't seem to go hunting without getting into a scuffle and singing about it, and actual battles seem to inspire multiple songs about what happened, but meanwhile, there are almost no traditional songs about the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, a three-day campaign that involved more than 200,000 men and saw 50,000 casualties. I'm not the first to point out that most of the popular songs from that era focused more on individual soldiers and the hardships they faced, rather than on the specifics of battles. And the mention of slavery was very rare as well, except for a notably badass stanza in Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic:
"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me
as he died to make men holy let us die to make men free
while God is marching on"
It may be that, as a "modern" war of the industrial era, the Civil War didn't need songs to share the details of battles. There were plenty of newspapers and things like the telegraph and railroad made it easier for people to travel around and discuss things. It may also be that, unlike a border skirmish, the Civil War was too big and complicated, and these songs of small, personal tragedies gave people something easier to relate to.
Sometimes poring through the excellent online resources of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, or Mudcat.org or Wikipedia for information on a folk song yields all sorts of fun and interesting knowledge, either about the historical context of the song, its likely composer or famous performances. Sometimes, as in the case of this week's Dead Lover ballad, all you get is, "yep, that's a song that exists."
"The Banks of the Lee" (Roud v167) dates back to at least 1850, but beyond that has little information on it other than that it's been a popular song for a while. The "v" in its Roud Number indicates that it comes from the database's Broadside Collection, rather than having been recorded in the field by a wandering ethnomusicologist. This indicates that it may have been written by a professional for popular consumption rather than appeared through the magical process of folk music creation (yes, I am well aware that every "traditional" song had to have been initially written by SOMEBODY, but the fact that these songs entered the tradition anonymously and are part of a community tradition is part of their appeal to many of us).
But let's talk about broadsides, or broadsheets for a moment, in the context of music consumption and its parallels to the modern media. In the modern age, we have "singles," songs sold separate from a collection or album, initially on vinyl records, but currently as digital files or even Youtube videos. Usually modern singles are meant to promote an artist or work by being played on the radio with a variety of other music, and as such represent the best, or at least catchiest, song a musician currently has to offer.
Back in the days before recorded music, people still wanted to hear new songs and craved variety just as modern listeners do today, but as the phonograph didn't show up till the late 1800s, human beings just spent most of their history passing stuff along by ear, which probably meant a lot of songs had the same second verse of "nurr, nurr nurrr, hmmm, hmmmm, my love something-something la la." (Joking aside, you will notice that certain phrases, metaphors and rhymes show up over and over, this is because it makes orally transmitted songs easier to remember).
At some point writing became a thing, and early forms of sheet music notation started showing up about 4,000 years ago. Through the Middle Ages music could be written down and shared across time and distance, but it had to by copied by hand, which meant a lot of time and labor and it was limited to mostly the church, the wealthy and professional composers. Then by the mid 1500s the printing press made distributing all sorts of writing more viable, including the words and music of popular songs. The cheapest way to print a document of any sort was a "broadsheet" or "broadside," which we in modern terms might call a "flyer," a single sheet of paper, printed on one side.
Songs printed on broadsides were sold cheaply and in large numbers, and spread songs to the masses. Some of them had musical notation with the melody of the song included, but back then a lot of folks could barely read the words, let alone musical notation. So the easiest way to make your song catch on was to set it to the tune of a traditional or popular song, and let people know you'd just written new words to a melody they already knew (in modern times, people call this "filk music," and think they're very clever for coming up with the idea). This accounts for the many, many folk songs that sound just like other folk songs but with different words.
Of course, sometimes, this leads to frustration for scholars and would-be performers, as the original song may be lost to history, so the little note at the bottom of the broadside that reads, "sung to the tune of..." is completely unhelpful. In these cases modern performers are free to set the words to whatever melody they feel like.
The Banks of the Lee was one of these songs likely written for a broadside. It did manage to catch on and has been performed by singers pretty consistently up to the present day. It tells the tale of two lovers along the River Lee in County Cork, Ireland (we can tell it's meant to be the Lee in Ireland not the River Lea near London because of multiple mentions of "wild Irish flowers"). It's not clear what the narrator's profession is, but in any case he travels away from his beloved Mary across the sea for a time, leaving her with the warning not to "stay out too late on the moorlands."
When he comes back, she's dead. It's not explicitly stated what kills her (werewolves?), but the fact that his warning not to stay out on the moors is included in the song suggests that the exposure to the elements on the cold, damp moor led to an illness that carried her off (I mean, she could have been eaten by werewolves, that would be a pretty good reason to stay off the moors at night). He then hangs out at her grave bringing her flowers.
It's a pretty sentimental song, almost a bit too sappy, especially in rhyming "dearly" with "sincerely," but it's redeemed a little bit with the hint of weather and wildness implied in spending a night on the moorlands. It's also sometimes sung slowly and excessively sentimentally, which I'm hoping to avoid in my version. I may not go full on alt-rock like Cordelia's Dad did in their version, but I plan on giving mine a little more bounce.
So far we've talked about lovers dying in battle, lovers dying of disease, lovers dying of mysterious causes and lovers dying of... um, love, but this time we're going to take a trip into the land of the murder ballad, where the lovers are killed by the other lovers.
Matty Groves (Child 81, Roud 52) was first documented in 1658, though it may be older, and has many variations in the names of those involved and even the melody used, but the story is always the same. Some wealthy and powerful man is out of town and his wife picks up a young man to sleep with while he's away. The hot-tempered lord returns home to catch the adulterous lovers together and kills them, sometimes quite gruesomely.
This particular version, tells of Lord Arnold, Lord Arnold's Wife and Little Matty Groves, but there are Lord Ronalds, Lord Arlens and Lord Donalds, as well as Matty being spelled Mattie or being called Little Musgrave like the Christy Moore version of the song. The traditional melody of Matty Groves resurfaced in the United States in the 1800s in the much, MUCH more cheerful Shady Grove, which is the story of a young man courting.
But this project isn't about cheerful love songs, now is it? Let's talk about the bloody drama and gleefully sordid details of Matty Groves instead.
First off, this story starts off in church, where the titular Matty Groves catches the eye of Lord Arnold's wife. We don't get too much background on any of these folks, but it's interesting to note that the unfortunate Matty is the only one with a given name. The Lord and Lady in the story are only referred to by title, and in the lady's case, she's not even called "Lady Arnold" in this version, but simply "Lord Arnold's Wife" as if to stress the fact that she's married to a fairly important man, and by the way, she's married and yeah, this is going to end badly.
Matty, who clues in the song suggest is of a lower social station, is initially reluctant to give in to the lady's advances, but she persuades him that her husband is away and he's not going to get into trouble for having a little fun (foreshadowing), and it's possible the story could have ended there but for a loyal servant who, overhearing the seduction goes to fetch his boss.
The song skips over the salacious details of the tryst, and the next thing we know, Matty wakes up in bed to find a justifiably irate Lord Arnold looking down at him and the lady. Jealousy may have turned Lord Arnold into a violent rage monster, but he's an honorable violent rage monster, and he challenges Matty to a duel. When Matty objects, that as a poor man he has no sword to fight with, Lord Arnold offers to loan him the better of his own weapons, and furthermore to give Matty the first blow.
As an aside, this may seem excessively generous of Lord Arnold, but it's worth bearing in mind that fighting with a sword is a learned skill, and while a highly motivated amateur can be extremely dangerous with a sharp weapon, it's very unlikely that they could hold their own against an experienced swordsman. We also hear Matty referred to throughout as "Little" Matty Groves, underscoring the fact that he's probably not as physically powerful as the lord.
What follows is as beautifully concise and brutal a description of a fight as I've ever come across:
"Matty struck the very first blow, and hurt Lord Arnold sore, Lord Arnold struck the very next blow and Matty struck no more."
"Little" Matty Groves becomes "Dead" Matty Groves pretty quickly and Lord Arnold sits his wife on his lap (mind you, she's probably still in some state of undress from her affair with Matty, and he's wounded and bloody, this is a gruesome parody of a sweet domestic scene), and cheerfully asks her who she likes better, him or a fresh corpse. The lady says she'd rather kiss the dead guy than "you in your finery," which Lord Arnold doesn't take well. Specifically he kills her. More specifically, the ballad tells us, "he struck his wife right through the heart and pinned her up to the wall."
Lord Arnold leaves his wife pinned to a wall by his sword (!!!) and calls for his servants to dig a hole and throw the two of them into a single grave, but to pile the lady on top because she came from a noble family. Presumably he then lights a cigar and walks away from an explosion like some cinematic antihero.
So... there's really no good guy in this story, though you can argue that cheating on a husband you didn't care for is probably less severe than murder. Or that sleeping with somebody else's wife is less severe than killing an unprepared peasant in a one-sided duel. It's worth noting that in a lot of times and places, the execution of an unfaithful wife would be looked on as a fair punishment, but the ballad doesn't really seem all that sympathetic to Lord Arnold. It's really just a sordid and bloody story about people doing bad things to each other, which makes it, of course, extremely entertaining and a classic of the genre.
It's interesting to see how many Dead Lover ballads seem to feature a wealthy young woman forced into an unhappy marriage. In fact, the unhappy marriage seems to be a common theme in a lot of these traditional songs, and it's almost always involving well-off people with lands and titles. It may be that for many centuries women were treated as bargaining chips to be used by their families to trade money and prestige, but based on the sheer number of times this comes up in song over the past four hundred years, it's also pretty apparent that at least part of society was really aware of this and didn't consider it a good thing.
It's also interesting to note that some of the exact language and situations come up in other songs, although with different outcomes. For example, in the slighly younger ballad "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy" and its variants (Roud 1, Child 200) a young lady runs off from her privileged position to follow a handsome vagabond, and while "Matty Groves" has the line "I'd rather one kiss from dead Matty's lips than you in your finery" the "Raggle Taggle Gypsy" has the line "I'd rather one kiss from the yellow Gypsy's lips than you in your finery." Mild racism aside, the later ballad has a bit happier outcome than "Matty Groves" in that the young lady runs off to be poor and happy rather than rich and miserable.
To be fair, though, Lord Arnold's Wife does end up reunited with her lover as well. They're together forever as Dead Lovers.
First off, I didn't do a music video this week, I've been on the road for a bit of a family issue and haven't recorded any new songs. While the final recordings will likely differ a lot from the basic acoustic renditions I've been posting here, I still like to give you an idea what they sound like.
Anyway, one of the questions that I expect will come up, at least from a marketing angle, is whether or not this album will fit into the "Steampunk Music" genre. The flippant answer is "sure, if you want it to." The less flippant answer is, "I think this will fall into the realm of what many Steampunks find interesting in both terms of style and subject matter, though my specific goal isn't necessarily to produce a Steampunk album."
The argument over what does or does not constitute Steampunk Music is, of course, contentious and ongoing on the battlefields of the internet. It's also, to my mind at least, largely a kind of stupid one. My understanding of Steampunk and retro-futurism is that it's meant to encompass either a) an alternate historical period where technological and social development took a very different and more rapid course or b) a view of the modern or futuristic period filtered through the lens of Victorian-era fashion and technology. Either way, if this alternate timeline is to encompass the whole world, there should be as much variety in musical genres as there are in the allegedly real world that we inhabit.
With that in mind, most of the songs for the Dead Lovers Project are from the 1800s, in the sense that they were either written then, were first collected then, or were known to be popular then. This is not through random chance, the period that brought us the Industrial Revolution also brought an increased scholarly interest in folk and popular traditions in music. Francis Child, Cecil Sharp, Sabine Baring-Gould and their cohorts were active from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s, making folk song collecting a pastime closely associated with Victorian scholars, many of whom also fit the mold of amateur gentleman/scientist/scholars beloved of Steampunk stories.
The subject matter is deliberately dark, after all, I'm singing about death, which was also a bit of a Victorian obsession, as it is in some of our own subcultures, though it being me I have a sense of humor about it. I'm also planning to use a mix of traditional and modern instrumentation to accompany many of the ballads, though I'm not sure how stylistically weird I'm going to let myself get (drum loops and digital instrument, for example, are really not my style, but part of me says that I should experiment with them on at least a couple songs for just that reason).
So... is it Steampunk? It is if you want it to be.
(and, if you're booking paid gigs at a Steampunk event, then yes, it's ABSOLUTELY Steampunk music!)
An interesting contrast between European folk songs and their American counterparts is in the presence of the supernatural. Old world folk ballads are full of references to ghosts, fairies, witches and curses and the like, while the American tales seem to omit supernatural references almost entirely, or substitute the Devil for any otherwordly presence.
This likely has something to do with the religious leanings of the initial colonists, and the Protestant idea that anything magical was connected to the Devil, though a more romantic take on it would be that the old fairies and ghosts of the colonists' homeland were bound to their old haunts and were left behind by the long sea voyage.
Whatever the reason, it's almost a given that if an English-language song contains supernatural elements, it's almost always one collected in the UK or Ireland, and it's rare to see a direct American variation. This week's Dead Lover ballad, "The Unquiet Grave" (Child 78, Roud 51) is just such a song, with many variations in its native England, but nothing much found on this side of the Atlantic prior to the 20th Century.
Wow, that's an old video... anyway.
This story is told in the first person, and, unlike many of our songs, starts out telling you that the speaker's "one true love" is dead right away. The narrator says they will spend a year and a day mourning on their lover's grave. Things get creepy when, after all that weeping the ghost of the deceased appears and complains that their still-living lover is disturbing their rest. Things get even creepier when our narrator demands a kiss from the "clay cold lips" of their dead love, who, being the more sensible of the pair refuses on the grounds that it would be fatal for their beloved. In many versions, the ghost then sets a set of impossible tasks for the living lover to complete, in this case a nut grown underground, water from a stone and milk from the breast of a virgin.
The "riddle" portion of the song is pretty interesting. I always assumed that they were components for a spell to make it possible for the living lover to share a kiss (or more) with the ghost without dying, but I've also read from other sources that this song reflects a belief that when one of an engaged couple dies, the survivor is still permanently bound to them, and the impossible tasks represent a ritual to free them. Or it might be taken that the ghost is just making these demands to make their lover go away for a while and allow them some rest.
This song also calls to mind the Irish ballad "I Am Stretched on Your Grave," which comes from a translation of a Gaelic poem that was set to music by an Irish folk-rock band called Scullion in the 1970s (and covered by many since, including this excellent version by Kate Rusby). In this case there is no ghost, but the narrator still takes the mourning at the graveside beyond what most would consider reasonable.
This song also takes on the idead that excessive mourning is a bad thing, with both the narrator's parents and the "priests and the friars" apparently pretty worried about the young narrator, but "Unquiet Grave" takes it a step further with the idea that the mourning is not only bad for the living, but can harm the dead. It's actually not an uncommon idea in religions and folk beliefs, either, that prolonged or showy displays of grief are bad for the departed,but I suspect that in both cases the real point is for the living to learn to move on after a loss.
In the songs I've explored to date, the cause of our protagonists' deaths is pretty apparent, if not necessarily realistic. One way or another they all died of broken hearts. But in a lot of traditional songs, death is a lot less explicit. Sometimes death will only be hinted at or alluded to through some of the verses, to be confirmed at the end, or sometimes, as in one of the popular versions of "Black is the Color" (Roud 3103), the narrator spends most of the song telling us how wonderful his or her beloved is, only to reveal that they've been tragically lost sometime before the last verse.
This may be due to a particularly deadly guitar solo after the second chorus, but in many cases it's because the song has had verses added, lost and changed over years of being passed around from one singer to another, and the actual reason for the tragic ending is lost along the way. Or, it's possible, based on some of the other versions of this particular song, it was originally just a straightforward love song and the tragic-sounding final verse was added by a later singer to make it more dramatic.
In the case of this week's featured song, however, the sense of loss is apparent from the earliest common versions, which appeared in the 1840s. "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond" (Roud 9598) has long been a well-known song, and in fact experienced a resurgence nearly a century after it was initially recorded as jazz versions of the song became popular in the 1930s, notably Martha Tilton's version with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. However the tragedy at the heart of the song is a bit obscure, and unraveling exactly what's going on takes a little understanding of historical context and a lot of speculation.
The narrator of the song describes, of course, the lovely scenery of the Scottish Highlands and how he would spend time there with his true love on the shores of the loch (lake). But then goes on to tell how he and this love of his "will never meet again" and how he'll be taking the "low road" back to Scotland. That's where it gets kind of dark.
While there are many possible interpretations of this song, one of the most agreed upon is that "taking the low road" refers to death, and the narrator expects to either be carried home as a corpse or travel back to his beloved homeland as a spirit (possibly along the mystical paths of the Celtic fairies and gods, which are inaccessible to living mortals) after being killed.
I think it's very likely, given the subject matter and time period that this song emerged, that it's the tale of a Scottish soldier, possibly active in the Jacobite Rebellion, and that he's either captured and expecting to be executed or was wounded in battle and doesn't expect to recover. In any case, his reminiscing to his companion reflects both his love of the woman he left behind and the love of the land that he'll never set living eyes on again.
This particular interpretation makes Loch Lomond particularly interesting in the context of Dead Lover ballads because it means that, rather than being sung in the third person about the deceased, or in the first person by the surviving lover, both of which are common presentations, this song is being sung by the soon-to-be dead lover himself, in anticipation of his fate. What makes this even more tragic is that, unlike some songs of this sort where the ill-fated speaker asks his companion to pass on a message to lovers or family, or "tell my wife I love her," the soldier in question doesn't even allow himself to reach out that way, such is his resignation to his fate.
Of course, this may be the gloomiest possible interpretation of the lyrics, and with the original author's intent lost to history, there are probably many more cheerful and optimistic ways I could take this song while working on the album's interpretation of it, but obviously this is what I'm going with.
Arranged marriages were fairly common in the British Isles, especially among families where money, land or titles were at stake, for a very long time, and make up provide inspiration for any number of tragic stories, plays and, of course, songs. While in real life most couples either found themselves growing fond of each other over time or came to some arrangement that let them basically ignore eah other for decades on end (which is easier to manage, I imagine, in a manor house than a studio apartment), in folk ballads they almost always end up involved in some sort of tragedy.
This week's Dead Lovers song comes from Scotland and was first written down in the early 1800s and is known as "Lord Saltoun and Auchanachie" (Child 239, Roud 102) or in more modern renditions simply as "Annachie Gordon"
In this story, young Jeannie from the Aberdeen region of Scotland wishes to marry a young man named Annachie (or Auchanachie, but it's hard enough to keep spelling it out the other way), but her father, feeling he isn't well-off enough, forces her into marriage with the local Lord Saulton (who, between 1785 and 1853 would have been Alexander George Fraser, though his wife's name was Catherine, so either the ballad is older than that or it took a lot of liberties with history, or probably both). Jeannie begs her parents not to marry her to a man she doesn't love when she'd rather have her handsome-but-broke lover Annachie, but the wedding goes ahead anyway.
In a particularly... I gues you'd say, "invasive" twist on the plot, when Jeannie refuses to consummate the marriage with Lord Saulton, her father orders her maids to "loosen up her gowns" at which point Jeannie falls to the floor and, as tragic heroines are wont to do in these situations, dies.
Annachie, who was off on a boat somewhere happens to come home the same day that Jeannie was both married and died, and comes across his lover's servants weeping and moaning for their lost lady. He goes up and gives his dead beloved a kiss and then, as tragic heroes are wont to do in these situations, dies.
I'm not an expert on this period in Anglo-Scottish history by any means, but my understanding, and some quick Google searching, seems to bear out that the late 1700s and early 1800s represented a time when arranged marriage was on its way out. I would speculate that maybe the ballad audiences of the time were fascinated by stories of arranged marriage gone awry in part because it was not the way things were currently done, and was regarded as a relic of the unenlightened past (not that, from our modern point of view, marriage and womens' rights were particularly enlightened in 1824, but hey, baby steps).
As an interesting contrast is another Scottish ballad from about the same time, "Jock O' Hazledean," (Child 293) which was a reworking by Sir Walter Scott of an even older song. In it, the young lady is to be married to a young lord named Frank (Lord of Langleydale, a town in the north of England) but is desperately in love with young Jock. Frank's father spends the song telling her how great her husband-to-be is, and how wealthy she'll be, but she's inconsolable. However, this song avoids a place on the Dead Lovers compilations because unlike poor Jeannie, the unnamed heroine of this song flees her wedding day and absconds across the border into Scotland with her Jock of Hazledean (which I'm not sure is actually a real place, unlike many of the others mentioned in these ballads, so if you're of a fantastical turn of mind, the "border" may not be between England and Scotland but the border of Fair Elfland. Or not, maybe Scott was more worried about rhymes than geography).
Once upon a time a friend of mine handed me a book that she'd found at a yard sale, and said "this seems like something you would like." It was a collection of Appalachian folk songs, The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles, which contained not only words and music to the songs, but information linking these American ballads back to the British, Irish and Scottish songs from which they evolved.
I learned a few songs from that collection which I perform to this day, but probably the one that I loved the most out of the bunch was "Barbry Ellen," an Americanized version of "Bonny Barbara Allen" (which I mentioned in my discussion of Child/Roud numbers in my last post). If you're looking for a classic Dead Lover ballad, this has it all. The cliched "merry month of May" (or June, depending on the version), the image of the lovers finally united only in death and, of course, way too many verses. It's also a lovely melody, though I admit when I learned my version I'd never actually heard it out loud, and was relying on my somewhat shaky music-reading skills. Still, I'm pretty fond of it.
In its various forms, Barbara Allen is one of the oldest and most widespread English language ballads. It was first mentioned in the diary of Samuel Pepys in 1666, and the earliest known published version of it dates back to 1690. It was reputed to be a favorite song of George Washington and in the modern day was a staple of the American folk revival, with versions by Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
While there are many different versions of the song, the basic story remains the same: William (or Willie, or Johnny or whoever) is desperately in love with Barbara Allen, and is sick with emotion. Barbara for whatever reason, rejects him and he dies of a broken heart. After William is gone, Barbara realizes how horrible she was, and how she really loved him, and soon pines away and dies thereafter. The two are buried side by side and are united at last in death. In some versions, plants grow on their gravestones, a rose from William's and a briar from Barbara's, which grow entwined in a "lovers' knot," symbolizing William's sweetness and Barbara's cruelty joined together in a familiar rose bush (and the idea that roses and thorns go together has been a staple of romantic songs, well, probably as long as there have been roses and romantic songs).
So what's the appeal? It's not gruesome like a good murder ballad, and it doesn't involve any real famous people, but it does contain an extreme version of a very familiar regret. Barbara Allen's pride causes her to reject the one man who would have been her perfect match, and she only realizes how much she really cared for him after he's gone and she's lost her chance. Once she understands what she's done, life doesn't seem worth living, so she dies.
It's worth mentioning, of course, that the characters in these ballads are terrible role models and nobody should actually go around dying over this sort of thing. However, many, if not most, of us have been Sweet William or Hard-Hearted Barby Ellen at some point in our lives, having felt like we were passed over by our perfect match for spurious reasons, or realizing that through our own pride or foolishness we've missed out on a person we could have been happy with only after it's too late to do anything about it. In the real world we mostly get over it and get on with our lives in time, but sometimes the fresh emotional wounds can feel pretty intense.
I think we'll find that this is a common theme with a lot of these songs. Emotional pain and heartbreak can FEEL like it's going to kill you in the real world even if it almost never does, in the world of Dead Lover ballads, it totally will. In these songs our own emotional journeys are played out in a larger and more dramatic fashion, which gives us a bit of catharsis, as well as reassuring us that we're not the only people who feel this way. Also, I suppose, when one has been dumped, it's nice to look at these characters and say, "well, at least I'M not going to die over this and have a damn bush growing out of my chest."
Lyrics to my version:
Barbry Ellen
Child 84, Roud 54
In Scarlet Town where I was born there was a fair maid dwellin’
She made the lads cry “wal a day” and her name was Barbry Ellen
In the merry month of may when the green buds they were swelling
Sweet William on his deathbed lay for the love of Barbry Ellen
He sent a servant to the town to the place where she was dwellin
My master bids you come to him if your name be Barbry Ellen
Slowly, slowly she got up and slowly went she nigh him
And as she drew the curtain back she said “young man, I think you’re dying”
“Oh yes I’m sick, I’m very sick, and ne’er will I get better
Unless I have the of one, the love of Barbry Ellen”
She said, “Do ye ken how in yonder town, in the place where you were dwellin’
You gave a health to the ladies ‘round, but you slighted Barbry Ellen?”
“Oh yes I ken, I ken it well, in the place where I was dwellin,
I gave a health to the ladies ‘round, but my heart to Barbry Ellen”
Then it’s lightly tripped she down the stairs, he trembled like an aspen
“Tis vain, tis vain my dear young man, to hone for Barbry Ellen”
He turned his pale face to the wall, for death was in him dwellin’
“Goodbye kind friends and kinfolk all, and be kind to Barbry Ellen”
And as she passed the wooded field, she heard his deathbell knellin’
With every stroke it spoke her name, “hard-hearted Barbry Ellen”
Her eyes looked East, her eyes looked west till she saw his pale corpse comin’
“Oh bearers, bearers put him down, that I may look upon him”
The more she looked the more she grieved until she burst out crying
“Oh bearers, bearers take him off, for now I am a-dying”
“Mother, mother go make my bed, make it soft and narrow
Sweet William died for me today, and I’ll die for him tomorrow”
“Father, father go dig my grave, make it deep and narrow
William died for the love of me, and now I shall die for sorrow”
They buried her in that old church yard, Sweet William’s grave was nigh her
And from his heart grew a red, red rose, and from her heart a briar
They grew up on that old church wall, till they couldn’t grow no higher
Grew till they tied a true lover’s knot, the red rose and the briar
In Scarlet Town where I was born, there was a fair maid dwellin’
She made the lads cry “wal a day” and her name was Barbry Ellen
As I compile my list of songs for this project (and possibly for work beyond this project) you'll notice some of them have little annotations after the title that say things like "Child 84" and "Roud 54."
These don't mean that the song was written by the 84th child or something weird like that, but instead refer to the song's place in one of two scholarly listings of English-language folk songs. The first is the collection of 305 songs known as the "Child Ballads." These were collected in the 1800s by Harvard professor Francis James Child, and though there are far more than 300 known traditional songs, a huge number of the ones that are still sung to this day are variations on songs from the collection.
The Roud Folk Song Index is a contemporary database, with more than 20,000 songs collected and cross-referenced by Steve Roud, a British librarian. Roud's database, which is hosted here by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is a fantastic scholarly resource which can help both performers and academics, as well as casual listeners, track down the roots of various songs.
The reason these numbers are helpful is that many of these songs have several popular variations, and can differ greatly by region or from one performer to the next. For example, the song I mentioned at the start, "Child 84, Roud 54" is the ballad known in some texts as "Bonny Barbara Allen."
Now, the version of the songs that I play, personally, is called "Barbry Ellen," and is a variant collected in the Appalachian Mountains in the early 1900s by John Jacob Niles. The words and tune are a bit different from other takes on the song, and probably very, very different from the original Scottish ballad, but if you compare multiple versions you'll see that the story and key phrases are identical, and that they're all the same root song, which fall under the same Child/Roud numbers.
I plan on including these numbers when I have them available, first in the interest of being scholarly and sounding smart, but also in case it could help one of my listeners feed their curiousity by making it easier to track down information about a ballad.
I'm starting this blog for a couple reasons. First, it's a matter of keeping myself accountable, if I keep writing about what I'm up to, and somebody actually reads it, I'll be more inclined to keep up some sort of work schedule for this album project I've got going on here.
Secondly, in the world of self-recording and digital albums, liner notes are, if not dead, then at least somewhat less healthy than they used to be, so this will function as kind of the liner notes to the upcoming album.
So what is the upcoming album?
Well, for several years I keep joking about how the traditional music repertoire, from which I draw most of my material, is full of songs about these horrible tragic romances. Lovers die from disease, from war, from jealously (either of broken hearts or more directly at the hand of a jealous lover) and all that. And I kept saying that I should record an album of just "dead lover" songs.
Well, as much as I joked about it, I realized that there was something strangely universal to these types of songs. People have long been fascinated by stories of tragedy and brutality. In the modern day, with all of our multimedia options, we turn to soap operas, true crime shows and reality TV, or we tune in to fictional tales of betrayal and murder and such. But in the past, in the days of broadsheet or further back into purely oral traditions, people still liked the same kind of gruesome tales. It's an interesting part of being human, and maybe as I go on with this I'll speculate on WHY we find these stories so fascinating, but for now it's enough to know we always have, and more than likely always will.
So, I'll be spending summer of 2016 working on learning, arranging and recording a bunch of "dead lover" ballads. Somewhere between 12 and 15 of them, maybe a bakers' dozen will make it to the final cut, we'll see.
I plan to record this whole thing at home, using some of what I've learned through classes and through experience. I have most of what I need, although I need a few hundred dollars worth of gear (an audio interface that will let me plug a good microphone directly into my computer, better software, maybe some cables and accessories). I expect to do most of it on my own, but I may try to con some of my talented friends into lending some of their expertise to the project.
Hang around a bit, we'll see how it all comes out!
