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.