The Golden Vanity (Child 286)
Illustration of “The Golden Vanity”
by Pamela Colman Smith, 1899
Villainy on the Lowland Sea
The ship was in a fix. Overtaken by an enemy galley, the captain looked for options to set her free. The cabin boy, at 15 the youngest member of the crew, offers to swim over to the galley and sink it with the help of his trusty auger. What’s to be his reward? Gold and the hand of the captain’s daughter in marriage. Our courageous cabin boy plunges into the sea and drills more holes in the galley than its crew can plug. He returns to The Golden Vanity victorious, the enemy galley sinking behind him.
No longer in peril, the captain thinks better of the deal. Gold, sure, but he reneges on the offer of his daughter’s hand. Our hero is left to drown, his shipmates give him an honorable burial at sea, and The Golden Vanity sails on.
I first heard “The Golden Vanity” years ago on Jody Stecher’s Going Up On the Mountain. I loved his version’s bright banjo and resonant refrains. I’m embarrassed to admit that I only recently realized that the song could be interpreted as a murder ballad. I must have been caught up in the refrains, and didn’t listen to the story all the way to the end. I later stumbled on the Carter Family’s “Sinking in the Lowland Sea.” That title was a clearer signal of a murder ballad, and it woke my ears up to Stecher’s version. We’ll identify in a moment a few good reasons why Child 286 is not the most obvious murder ballad. For starters, murder is not the most important plot point in this tale.
I was consoled about missing the murder in “Golden Vanity” when I read Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s comments in a recent interview with Mason Adams. She discusses her use of “crankies,” scrolled pictorial devices to accompany the ballads she sings with Elizabeth LaPrelle:
“These people who grew up with ballad singers, they heard these ballads hundreds of times by the time they were eight. They’d hear them over and over. They probably didn’t understand the song the first time they heard it, or even the tenth or twentieth time. As you hear a ballad many times, it slowly comes to life. Nothing about the way it’s presented obviously shows you what the story is. The music is pretty static. It doesn’t change whether it’s the beginning phrase or the phrase where she murders them.”
This is why we always provide you with the lyrics. Listening for the story can be difficult at first. Stecher’s lyrics, as well as the lyrics for over a dozen other versions, appear on this Mudcat thread. You can even find there a version of the lyrics in Esperanto. Mudcat is a wondrous place.
“I’ll shoot you and I’ll stab you and I’ll sink you in the tide.”
Today’s post will provide a jump start, if you need one, on “The Golden Vanity.” I hope it will make this scrappy little ballad come to life more quickly for you than it did for me. The song is a staple of Anglo-American folk music. Our playlist alone is over 110 recordings. Its popularity within that sphere suggests that there’s something quite important in its story. Part of its success lies in it being a relatively tidy (no pun intended) tragedy that still leaves room for the listener to imagine details around the edges. Another part of its success lies in its critique of social class, starting in an era in which English audiences and especially American audiences wanted to hear that critique. The vital core, though, lies in our identification with the cabin boy as the better man and our sympathy with the raw deal he gets for his efforts at the hands of the “noble” captain.
Broadside lyrics for Child 286
Child 286 first appeared around 1635 as “Sir Walter Raleigh Sailing In The Lowlands (Shewing how the famous Ship called the Sweet Trinity was taken by a false Gally & how it was again restored by the craft of a little Sea-boy, who sunk the Gally),” You can find early lyrics here, from a later printing (c.1685). In this version, the cabin boy’s death is only implied. Finished with his mission, and faced with the captain’s refusal to honor his word regarding his daughter, the cabin boy says merely “then fare you well, you cozening Lord.” While the cabin boy’s death is a fair inference here, and a plausible conclusion to the story, it’s not the only one. Subsequent versions make his fate far clearer, serving to compound the captain’s deceitful dishonor with the cabin boy’s death.
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I should also add that in almost every version, the cabin boy’s promised betrothal to the captain’s daughter is pretty much a property transaction. It has implications for the cabin boy’s class status, but it is likely not a romantic scheme by the cabin boy and the daughter. The song’s audiences through much of its history would have understood it at some level as a property transaction. As I mention in the post, in a very few versions, the cabin boy refrains from sinking the ‘Golden Vanity’ in spite because of the love he bears for the captain’s daughter (as well as the crew), but she is effectively a symbol and a non-character in this story. You could even suppose that she is an invention of the captain for bargaining purposes.
Regardless of how much credence you want to devote to the cabin boy’s declaration of love, if it’s there at all, the song fully embodies the patriarchy of its day (and many days that followed), and we’re well advised to keep that point in view.
An auger would not have done the job but scratching out the oakum and caulk between planks would have accomplished the desired result before the crew would have discovered and dispatched to he offending cabin boy.
Agreed, John. Good point. Other sources I’ve seen point out that ships of the era would have had carpenters and pumps that would have made such an assault ineffective. The song seems to require some suspension of disbelief on this point. In some versions, the songwriters address this issue by alleging that the crew of the galley (be they Turkish, Spanish, pirates, or otherwise) were distracted by various unwholesome diversions. Most pointed in this regard is probably Paul Joines’s: “some were at cards and others at dice, while still others were taking the Devil’s own advice.”