Undead Lovers: The Unquiet Grave

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.

Dying Far From Home: The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond

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.

Matchmaking Mayhem: Annachie Gordon

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).

Barbara Allen: The OG of Dead Lover Ballads

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

By the numbers, a brief note on Child and Roud numbers

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.

What I'm up to here

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!