‘NOUTHER RICHT SPELL’D NOR RICHT SETTEN DOWN’
19TH C SCOTS WOMEN SINGERS OF BALLADS, AND COLLECTORS
The famous complaint quoted in the above title was made by Margaret Laidlaw, mother of poet and songmaker James Hogg, to Sir Walter Scott, and recalled by Hogg. ‘There war never ane o my songs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel, and ye hae spoilt them awthigither. They were made for singin an no for readin; but you hae broken the charm noo, an they’ll never (be) sung mair. And the worst thing of aa, they’re nouther richt spelled nor richt setten down’.
I am only including a few recordings of favourite ballads in this section, in part because there are such variations in recordings text and tune .
The book she complained of, ‘Scott’s Minstrelsy Of The Border’ became massively popular, and the ballads in it were read as poetry, mistakenly accepted as all belonging to Scott’s Borders area. Some indeed told of Borders places and dramatic events, but versions of most of them continued to be sung throughout Scotland and England.
David Buchan says a ballad is ‘a folksong that tells a story, where folksong means a song that has been transmitted by word-of-mouth instead of by print’. They are ‘tales of marvel, love and butchery, told in a style strikingly distinct from that of most poetry’.
The singing women in this book were themselves in a sense ‘social collectors’, learning, absorbing and committing to memory a bank of songs they heard others sing, often nurses or household workers.
As I said in my Introduction, the term ‘collector’ is more usually applied to people, mostly males, who gathered in the songs from the singers, wrote texts and tunes down or recorded them, then often processed or collated the versions that they were published under their names. Few of the early men ‘editorial collectors’ credited much more than the names and places of residence of their Scots-speaking women singers.
This chapter tells about some Scots women with large ballad and song repertoires, the collections made of their knowledge, and their versions of a ballad or song.
Women in the old Scots ballads have their severe troubles. In ‘The Brown Girl’ the old love insults the skin colour of the new bride, who stabs the old love, and the new husband cuts his bride’s head off and kicks it against the wall. In ‘The Two Sisters’ the older one drowns the younger in jealous rage because a suitor prefers he younger, whose bones and hair are made into a harp, and when it is played at the older sister’s wedding to the suitor it tells of the murder. ‘The Cruel Mother’ kills her new-born babes, who return to haunt her reproachfully. ‘Clerk Saunders’ talks his beloved into sleeping with him, but her seven brothers come in to the bedroom, Saunders is stabbed and slowly dies in his Lady’s arms. In ‘The Dowie Dens Of Yarrow’ the ploughboy hero fights seven armoured knights for the girl’s hand, beats them all, then her brother knifes him dead from behind. A lady's husband thinks that visiting ‘Bob Norris’ is her lover, cuts off his head and throws it into her lap saying 'Lady, here's a ba', whereupon she explains she loves Bob because he is her son.
Sometimes the bereft girl says she will never marry another, sometimes like ‘Barbara Allan’ she dies of remorse or grief, though in ‘Glenlogie’ Jeannie of Bethelnie threatens her father she will die of love and the threat works. In ‘Lang A Growin’ the girl is promised to a young lad, but he dies soon after they wed. ‘Lord Randall’ is poisoned and ‘The Lass Of Lochroyal’ dies of exposure, both victims of female disapproval.
Occasionally there is a happier, or at least less extreme, outcome. The elderly ‘Laird O Drum’ courts and marries a young shepherdess to the disapproval of her father and the laird’s male relatives and neighbours – unusually, this is in fact a true tale. ‘Lord Beichan’ goes to fight the Turk, is freed from prison by the jailor’s daughter, they exchange vows, she waits seven years then sails to find him just married, but he casts off the new and marries the Turkish lady. ‘The Forester’ rapes a girl and rides off, she angrily pursues him to the Royal court where the king makes him marry her, and it turns out she is of far nobler blood than him. The young giant ‘Lang Johnny More’ goes down from atop a mountain to London to serve the king, the princess falls for him and he is about to be hanged till his two giant uncles intimidate the king and rescue Johnnie, who takes the princess north. ‘The Beggar Man’ runs off with the daughter of the house, but proves to be a disguised noble, or even the King. ‘Eppie Moray’ is a wily girl who resists her forced marriage and is rescued still a maid.
On the other hand, a Scots prisoner is overheard by ‘The Flower Of Northumberland’ promising to marry any girl who frees him, but near his home he confesses he is already wed, and sends the girl back south where her father is angry but her mother comforting. Mothers can have hard times too. In ‘Son David’ she quizzes her son till he confesses to fratricide. In ‘Johnnie O Breadislie’ she begs him without success not to go deer-poaching.
Women were singing these ballads, but men were ‘collecting’, editing together and on occasion rewriting the songs they found. They surely got many if not most of their texts from women informants. And there are two impressive early collections written down by women of the varied ballads and songs they knew. The probable female authoress of the Mansfield ms, Eliz Dalrymple, and Harris sisters Amelia and Jane.
Who were the men ‘editorial collectors’?
Edinburgh poet Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) edited ‘The Tea-Table Miscellany’ and ‘The Ever Green’ and is considered as a pastoral writer and editor who revived interest in ‘vernacular literature’.
David Herd (1732– 1810) of Marykirk collected old Scottish poems and songs. In 1769 he published his first compilation of nearly 60 'heroic ballads' and 300 songs as ‘Ancient Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc’.
Scotland’s tragi-heroic poet Robert Burns collected many lyrics for ‘The Scots Musical Museum’ and for ‘Scottish Melodies’, often adding new verses, or rewriting holus-bolus using only the old tune and title.
Sir Walter Scott in his ‘Minstrelsy’ opus gives 112 items and copious notes, 30 of them not ‘traditional’ but authored compositions. His notes are copious, with 35 pages on ‘The Fairies Of Popular Superstition’ preceding 45 verses of ‘The Young Tamlane’ (Tam Lin).
The supreme authority on British ballads, Professor Francis J Child of Harvard University, was not a collector from singers, but an ‘academic collector’ who selected and edited ballad texts found in books and sent to him by correspondents, he never even heard sung the texts he gathered up, and then numbered, assembled and published them in his chosen order in 1882-1898. He did however recognise the pre-eminence of women as learners and preservers of ballads, referring to the memories of ‘men, or better, of women, who have been the chief preservers of ballad-poetry’. Elsewhere, in The Nation, he wrote ‘for it will be noted that it is mainly through women everywhere, ‘The spinners and the knitters in the sun, and the free maids that weave their thread with bones’ that ballads have been preserved.’
From 1902 schoolmaster and musician Gavin Grieg (1856-1914) of Whitehill, New Deer, and the Reverend James Duncan (1848-1917) of Lynturk near Alford, quartered North-east Scotland, noting down multiple text and tune versions of 1933 songs, though the full fruits of their labour were not published until the eight volumes of ‘The Grieg-Duncan Folk Song Collection’ of 1981-2002. Volume eight includes detailed biographical accounts of some of their major informants.
Eventually sound recording machines began to be used in Scotland, by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser to record Gaelic songs, then by visiting Americans James Madison Carpenter from 1929 to 1931, Alan Lomax in 1951 and later, and Professor Kenneth Goldstein in 1959/60.
[See auldaiberdeenshiresangs.com.]
Kennedy-Fraser and Carpenter used cylinder recording machines, later ‘editorial collectors’ recorded onto tape. American Margaret Fay Skaw and Scot John Lorne Campbell had begun to record on cylinders, then on wire and in 1937 on disc.
In 1951 Lomax showed Scot Hamish Henderson how a tape recorder could be used, and Henderson proceeded to record thousands of hours of song, story and linked information all across the country for the archives of the School Of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh.
In the following short biographical accounts of major women singers who shared their knowledge with ‘editorial collectors’ I have selected ballad verses from one or more long texts of their songs that illustrate women’s roles within each narrative.
ANNA BROWN OF FALKLAND – THE PROFESSOR’S DAUGHTER
Anna Brown [1747-1810] of Falkland gave many ballad lyrics to Robert Jamieson and Walter Scott for them to publish. She had learned them by the age of 10 or 12 years, from female family members – her mother, her aunt Anna Forbes of Allanaquoich (who had herself learned her ballads from nurses and ‘old women’) and a maidservant. She was able to share 51 versions of 38 ballad stories, and F J Child esteemed her, commenting ‘No Scottish ballads are superior in kind to those recited in the last century’ by her. Antiquarian William Tyler got two manuscripts of them written down in 1783. Tyler wrote ‘Anna Gordon's father expressed surprise at his daughter's skill in balladry and confessed that the words and tunes were previously unknown to him.’
She was born in Old Aberdeen, the youngest daughter of the professor of humanity at King's College, Aberdeen. She married the Revd Dr Andrew Brown, who became minister of Falkland in Fife. Scott published her texts in'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802, Jamieson in ‘Popular Ballads and Songs in 1806. 13 of her 33 ballad stories have never been recorded in Britain outwith the North-East. 20 of the ‘A’ texts in Child’s 'English and Scottish Popular Ballads' (1882–98), in his opinion the best versions, were from Anna Brown.
David Buchan comments that ‘The strongly romantic and marvellous cast of her ballad stock reflects the regional tradition’s richness’ in these themes, while not including ‘the region’s wealth of historical and semi-historical ballads. This imbalance presumably resulted from her sources of all being women‘. In her version of ‘Young Bicham’ a young adventurer goes to fight in the East, is taken prisoner but freed by the turnkey’s daughter. After seven years Shusy Pie, comes looking for him, he has just married but honours his prior promise to Shusy.
YOUNG BICHAM
In London town was Bicham born, he longed strange countries for to see
But he was taken by a savage Moor, who handled him right cruelly
For thro his shoulder he put a bore, and thro the bore has pitten a tree
An he’s gar'd him draw the carts o wine, where horse and oxen had wont to be
O this Moor had but ae daughter, I wot her name was Shusy Pie
She’s goen her to the prison-house, and she’s called Young Bicham word by
‘O hae ye ony lands or rents, or cities in your ain country
Could free you out of prison strong, and could maintain a lady free?’
‘Old Timey’ US singer and musician Tom Paley recorded a version of this ballad, called ‘Lord Bateman’, which he told had been performed every year competitively at an early 20th Century festival of old music in the southern USA, by an old man who never won any prize, but wanted the ballad to live on. A very similar text with many of the same verses sung by that singer in the USA had earlier been printed under the title ‘Lord Beigham’ as a broadside by James Lindsay of 9 King Street, Glasgow.
ELIZABETH ST CLAIR OF HAILES – PROBABLY
An early manuscript collection apparently made by a woman, the little-known anonymous Mansfield manuscript, is held in Broughton House, Kirkcudbright. The 190+ song lyrics noted in it include rich versions of 19 Child ballads, along traditional and known composed pieces, some long texts others short fragments. One about people of Fife was worked over by Robert Burns. His version says
Up wi' the carls of Dysart, and the lads o' Buckhaven
And the Kimmers o' Largo, and the lasses o' Leven
The Mansfield version, with fine lines about women’s work, is titled ‘The Dance of Dysart’.
Here’s to the Dance of Dysart, and the comers of Largo
And the brides of Buckhaven, an the Gossips of Leven
Hey ca through ca through, for we have muckle to do
We have sheets to shape and we have beds to make
And we have corn to shear and we have bairns to bear
In Ronnie Clark’s chunky self-published book on the ms. he has dug deep, and says he ‘suspects’ the compiler of the book to have been Elizabeth Dalrymple of Hailes, nee St Clair of Herdmanston, Saltoun, in East Lothian [1733-1811]. She was part of the social circle of literary ladies that included poetesses Alison Cockburn, Joanna Bailie and Lady Anne Barnard.
MARY MCQUEEN OF KILBURNIE – A TINKLAR OF SOME BEAUTY
Mary Storie nee McQueen of Kilburnie, gave 68 songs to collector and editor Andrew Crawfurd of Lochwinnoch. Crawford said she ‘has a great number of old ballads which I had fished out of her for Mr William Motherwell.’ Mary was ‘of a travelling or some such a tinklar family who had taken their quarters in the houses of the Boghead, after the Boghead mill was burnt [in about 1811]’. Mary MacQueen 'had some beauty’, she was employed as a servant by William Semphill, portioner of Little Cloak, Boghead, but she refused him and married weaver Willie Story in Lochwinnoch in 1821. In 1828 the Stories, an extended family of Willy’s parents, Willie and Mary and their four children, and Willie’s brother Rab, ‘a youth very fond of whisky’, all emigrated to the Hull area in Upper Canada, initially staying with another brother, James.
She had learned her songs from her mother, and her brothers Tam and Hamilton, both of whom worked as masons. Tam (Thomas) had already published several volumes of his verse when he was employed by Motherwell in 1827 to go to seek out ballads in Ayr and Galloway.
Mary McQueen shared 100 lines for Child ballad 76, ‘The Lass Of Loch Royal’. In her version Lady Margaret brings her baby to the castle where her love Lord Gregory lies sleeping. The evil ‘arrant’ witch who answers her call pretends to be him and sends her away to die. At the end both lovers are dead, and the arrant witch laughs in her coach.
LORD GREGORY aka THE LASS OF LOCH ROYAL
O wha will shue my bonny fit, or wha will gluve my hand
Or wha will father my babie till Gregory cums hame
Your faither will shue your bonnie fit, your brither will gluve your hand
And the best will father your babie till Gregory cums hame
O turn o turn Lady Margaret he said, o turn o turn said he
If ye be the lady o Loch Ryan seekand Lord Gregory
He dwalls wihin yon bonny castle that’s thiekit wi the tin
An ye stand there to your deeand day you’re never to win in
In other versions it is Gregory’s mother who rejects her. Variants of the first four lines survive as ‘wandering verses’ in US Appalachian songs, ‘Who will shoe your pretty little foot?’
AGNES LYLE OF KILBARCHAN
Agnes Lyle of Kilbarchan, was born about 1775. She had learned most of her songs from her weaver father. The Kilbarchan Lyles have had a continuing presence in preserving and celebrating ballads. Cuthbert Lyle created two booklets of the ballads and poems of the town, and his daughter Emily Lyle is a foremost Scottish authority on ballads.
In 1825 Agnes gave 22 songs to William Motherwell, who in turn shared them with scholar F J Child. Her songs were of love triangles and patriotic songs, she was said to be cynical about their themes, but when she sang the lyrics of ‘Sheath and Knife’, a song about incest between siblings, she was moved to tears.
SHEATH AND KNIFE aka THE BROOM BLOOMS BONNIE
'Will you go to yon hill so hie’, the broom blooms bonnie, and so is it fair
‘Take your bow and your arrow wi thee', and we'll never gang up to the broom nae mair
'When ye hear me give a cry, ye'll shoot your bow and let me ly.
'When ye see me lying still, throw awa your bow and come running me till.'
It was nae wonder his heart was sad, When he shot his auld son at her head.
It was nae wonder his heart was sair, when he shooled the mools on her yellow hair.
AMELIA AND JANE HARRIS OF FEARN
Sisters Amelia [1815-1891] and Jane [1823-1897] of Fearn in Angus where their father was minister gave ballads and songs to Wm Aytoun and Francis J Child. Child made much use of what they shared. They had learned many of their lyrics from their mother Grace, who had got them from ‘an old nurse, whose store of antient Ballad lore was inexhaustible’. Grace ‘picked up a mere tithe of Jannie Scott’s old songs, before she was 10 years old’ in 1792 in Blairgowrie.
They wrote down their repertoire together in two manuscripts, 29 ballads and 59 other songs. The first ms was sent in 1859 to Professor Aytoun of Edinburgh University by Amelia after she heard him talk about ballads in Lerwick. He was very appreciative, and pleased that their version of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ scotched the then current suggestion that the ballad was a recent ‘forgery’. Amelia wrote that she was ‘most scrupulous in writing them exactly as I heard them, leaving a blank, when I was in doubt as to a word or line’.
SIR PATRICK SPENS
Hie sits our king in Dunfermline, sits birlin at the wine
Says ‘Whaur will I get a bonnie boy that will sail the saut seas fine
That will haud ower to Norawa and bring my dear dochter hame?’
They hadna sailed a league, a league, a league but only three
When the whirlin winds and the ugly jaws cam driving to their knee
There was Saturday and Sabbathday, and Monanday at morn
That silken sheets and feather beds cam floatin to Kingshorn
O lang lang will his lady sit wi the black shoon on her feet
Afore she see Sir Patrick Spens come driving up the street
In 1873 Jane made a further manuscript collection of their ballads, lyrics and airs both and piano accompaniments for the ballad airs, and wrote to Aytoun’s successor David Masson listing titles and asking for ‘an idea of their pecuniary worth’. She was referred on to F J Child, who got Norval Clyne of Aberdeen to meet with her. Clyne wrote to Child, ‘All I can gather about her pecuniary views is that she does put a money value on the ms and that she has been offered something by somebody, who said that if she lent it to any other body he would withdraw his offer. She is personally an exceedingly pleasant lady, with means apparently sufficient to enable her to live comfortably and ramble here and there’ [with her sister]'. Child stumped up £15, had the ms bound in ¾ maroon morocco with marbled boards for another six shillings, and lodged it in the Houghton Library in Harvard.