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 →Murder Ballad Monday→Fair Ellender
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Fair Ellender

Sing Out! Posted on by

For the first selection: Fair Ellender.  


Here is Jerry Garcia and David Grisman’s version from “Shady Grove.”


Fair Ellender  (Spotify)


Here’s the same song on YouTube:

(link replaced 12/10/14)



While not the most famous of the genre, this one has had some legs, with versions by Mike Seeger, another by the Seeger family, the Iron Mountain String Band, and Jean Ritchie, among others (also available on Spotify).  It’s clearly one that made it across the pond.  


It’s a version of Child Ballad #73, “Lord Thomas and Fair Annet.”  One variant goes to 30 stanzas, another to 19.  This one is shorter.  Leach, in “The Ballad Book” (1955), offers that some of the stanzas may have come from fairy ballads, but it also has the “news story becomes song” aspect to it.  A bunch of variant lyrics can be found here.


I picked this song because I’ve played it myself.  The melody lends itself to a kind of Carter picking (playing the melody on the base strings between strums).  The story is relatively short and to the point, and has the dimensions of classic tragedy.  Lord Thomas offers up an epitaph for the three at the end, but otherwise the song is “show, not tell” as to why the tragedy comes to pass.


A lot going on here, with a love triangle, and a double-murder and suicide.  Fair Ellender is closest to Lord Thomas’s heart, which is clear; but it also seems clear that he plans to go forward with his wedding to the Brown girl.  She has house and land, and Lord Thomas follows the wishes of his father (or mother) over the apparent wishes of his heart.


The variants of the song differ as to whether the betrothed is the “Brown girl” or the “brown girl,” and some verses make a big deal of differences in complexion between the two women.  More recent versions, Mike Seeger’s and the Garcia/Grisman one above, understandably downplay or eliminate this aspect.  Finding these verses makes me like the song less, for obvious reasons, but also because I think the song has more than enough resonance tapping into the theme of jealousy based on Lord Thomas’s emotional attachment to Ellender alone.  

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  4. Two Soldiers

Comments

Fair Ellender — 5 Comments

  1. Thanks for your comment! I’ve had to go back and read through some of this discussion to remind myself of the ground we had covered here. This was the first substantive post I wrote, over 10 months ago.

    I think you’re on target that cultural perceptions of sin informing how this story would have been heard by many. The religious element is a bit underdeveloped in my post, as it pretty much remains implicit at most in the song. I think the tension/disconnect between cultural sources that you refer to at the end is very much at play here.

    To my mind, Ellender’s sin or accountability varies considerably depending on the version you pick, and we do dig into this issue a little bit in the “Who’s really guilty here…” post (#3 of that week). Shaleane’s thoughts about the Brown Girl’s moral agency are particularly helpful in expanding this aspect of the song.

    I hope you’ll also take a look at Pat’s excellent work on “Matty Groves,” which takes up some of these issues of class and honor as well.

    Thanks again for joining the conversation. Please come again.

  2. I think there is a kernel of truth in the ‘class jealousy’ thesis. Lord Thomas’ father ignored both his son’s love (and therefore the ideal of a loving marriage) and the gap between the classes in order to increase his land. The consequences of this is a double murder and a suicide. There is a structure of sin as well. Ellender is guilty of jealousy, the brown girl guilty of jealousy and murder, and Thomas of murder and suicide. It would have been understood by a fully churched people that all three of these people are guilty of mortal sin, most especially Thomas. There is an implicit commentary, I think, on the consequences of ignoring the demands of the church and society, while also pointing out that the “reward for sin is death.”
    The high classes, that is, the classes who came from the old ruling families, the landed gentry, and the third generation after a man was accepted into court by way of military honor or intellectual, artistic, poetic, or social excellence would often marry for money and land and not for love. This partly explains the proliferation of songs from Matty Groves to this Fair Ellender, and many others in which a common theme seems to be rejecting finery or land for love, or to avenge a love.
    I don’t know if honor is what is at stake here. By the standards of the time, no one is acting honorably in this song. I agree with Mr. Blackman—the song is felt, not analyzed, by the singer and the listeners. I have a gut feeling it’s about the consequences of not marrying for love. If we think about Matty Groves, or the Gypsy Laddie, or even House Carpenter, there are similar themes of wives ‘getting their fair due’ when they violate the sacred bond of marriage and love. The disconnect between the English-Christian/Chivalric ideal of a loving, productive, class-based marriage and the realities of the time generate these strange ballads.

  3. Fascinating question…

    Honor/credit was vital to the gentry, and well understood by the humble folks as well. Violence was ubiquitous. The same British commoners who sang the earliest versions of this ballad just as easily related to a performance of Romeo and Juliet. Appalachian pioneers might not have gone in for Shakespeare, but they understood honor and violence. You point out rightly that the later versions are shorter, and so we may be missing some key narrative detail, but I imagine that a listener didn’t NEED it spelled out, even if the entertainment value of doing so was high.

    Would a humble 17th century Briton or an 18th or 19th century American mountaineer do more than ‘feel’ the song, going so far as to delve into motives and the like? I think they must have on some level, albeit not in the analytical way we know psychology.

    I imagine the violence made simple terrible sense to them. Yes it was extreme, or it must have been perceived as such for the narrative to work, but the violence was not unimaginable. The jealousy, and the affront to her honor, was enough to justify (psychologically, not legally) the brown girl’s attack. Not only did Thomas invite the girl he REALLY loved to his wedding, he told everyone she was the prettiest one there, in front of his new bride!

    I always joke with my students after we pick this song apart to relieve some of the tension; “Ok, boys. Take a lesson. When you go to the dance with a girl, don’t stand there and say that ANOTHER girl is the prettiest one there.” They all laugh, and somewhat as insiders since middle school dances boil over with such drama. Is is silly to think that someone back then might have taken the same sort of simple lessons in a context that made sense to them?

    My students often point out the parallels between ballads like this and certain narratives in some rap music. I do not have familiarity with the genre, but they point out that they are not unfamiliar with stories of well-armed people getting involved in all sorts of mischief and committing violence over what in the end are issues of perceived honor.

    My students have a harder time though with Thomas’s suicide. I’ll leave that alone for now though as I must spend time on some much less interesting things…

  4. Good points all. Yes, I had supposed it was a reference to class or what’s commonly referred to as ethnicity, rather than what’s commonly referred to as race. Your last paragraph is particularly interesting in raising the question of what the role of the crime is in the song. If the song doesn’t invoke an actual story, is the murder (or set of murders) it contains merely an attention getting device to draw out a larger theme? It certainly makes it more interesting.

    The American reading you propose would view it as a tragedy only–a clash of incompatible goods. The British reading you propose would potentially add to this more of a social critique. Perhaps there is minimal difference between these two options.

    Somewhat distinct from the social/political aspects here, I’m also interested how the song functions as a narrative of personal interaction. Why, for instance, does Lord Thomas think it’s a good idea to invite Fair Ellender to his wedding to the Brown girl? Perhaps it’s a naive question, as this move just helps the song’s story along, but at some level, to the song’s narrator or to its listener, such a move makes some kind of sense. Is there a time or an era wherein this makes any more or less sense? Do we read the psychology behind it any differently than a listener would have done four centuries ago?

    Also, why the Brown girl decides to kill Fair Ellender appears to vary somewhat with the version of the song. The difference touches on the earlier theme of class. In some versions, Fair Ellender, the character, explicitly draws the contrast between her own fairness and the Brown girl’s appearance, and the Brown girl kills her. So, in these renditions, part of the motive is a kind of class jealousy. In other versions, the killing happens without any prior verbal exchange, as though Fair Ellender’s presence and her command of Lord Thomas’s true feelings is sufficient to motivate her murderous jealousy. Even if the latter versions are somehow bowdlerized relative to this particular issue, my question is: Is the song any less compelling or dramatically effective? Does the killing make more or less sense?

  5. I perform this ballad for my 8th graders as part of their introduction to early American history. It’s got 17th century origins in Britain but survives in America well, so it’s a great lens through which to see who we were and who we became. More on the use of these ballads with post-modern American 8th graders another time! Suffice it to say, they like them and respond to them in a way they never do to their text book.

    My students invariable pick up on the brown/Brown issue that you mention. It’s understandable that they immediately see it as race, and it’s always a great jumping off point for discussion.

    Clearly, 17th Century British gentry were not practicing interracial marriage in a way we would recognize. Child 200 (Gypsy Laddie, or Black Jack Davey in America) deals with a married gentlewoman running off with a gypsy (or several), but in this ballad Lord Thomas clearly feels that his father/mother would see the ‘brown girl’ as marriage material. Nothing I know of Britain at that time convinces me that she could be anything ‘less’ than English. But, if you listen to Ewan MacColl’s version, it’s clearly about her color; the “nut brown” maid! So, it’s unlikely that it’s a family name Brown in the older versions.

    What then does it mean? Possibly she is of Spanish or other southern European descent, three or four generations back. But given how many of the old ‘love songs’ from Britain use the phrase ‘lily white’ to indicate beauty in a gentle woman, and how important class was and is in Britain, it seems more likely to me that it’s about just what ‘level’ of gentry she might be.

    The implication might be that she was of a level closer to yeoman, or at least of having such origins despite her family’s current wealth. I do not understand the complexities of how such families could rise in rank, but I do know from my research that it was possible, and common enough such that there were rules and traditions about it all. The father ignored his son’s feelings, and Ellender’s high birth, for the sake of adding land to the family’s holdings.

    Obviously, 8th graders can’t go too far with it, but it’s a great way to get them to understand that land is power in Britain, and that class mattered. At any rate, they always ask about that line.

    Maybe Americans sing it because we hear it ultimately as an anti-class song, as a rejection of the old European ways of wealth. Love matters most, and certainly more than money. But it’s quite possible that 17th Century Britons didn’t hear it that way at all. Maybe it was originally a warning about what happens when the old gentry mix with the new.

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