Illustration from “Billy Taylor” broadside “The Tragedy of the Press-Gang:  A True and Lamentable Ballad call’d Billy Taylor, shewing the fatal effects of Inconstancy.”

Transvestism!  Seafaring!  Betrayal!  Murder!

In my last full week of posts, I explored “The Demon Lover” or “The House Carpenter.”  In the original, that song is a tale of a woman whose first lover is pressed into service in the navy.  He dies at sea and a spirit returns in his guise to lure her away from her children and her carpenter husband to her doom. 

Prior to the writing those posts, I came across the ballad “Willie Taylor” or “Billy Taylor,” which is another ballad involving the separation of lovers by military press gang, but with a somewhat different result.  The song caught my interest because it seemed to me to be a version of some other old ballads I liked, but with a more murderous twist, or a very particular body count (one). 

In any event, it was good background or antiphonal material as I made my way through “House Carpenter.”  (As it turns out, there’s also a bit of a connection between “Billy Taylor” and another song that occupied our attention for a recent series of posts, “Mack the Knife.”  We’ll get to that later.)  The main thing that struck me about both songs, was that they were both about a set of limited choices for women within some fairly tightly defined boundaries and expectations of romantic faithfulness.  One, though, was clearly a tragedy, the other was not–or at least not so clearly, depending on your perspective.  The subtitle writer for the picture above seems to disagree with me.

The other Willie Taylor

The other Billy Taylor

[Before we proceed, I would just like to observe that attempts to images to illustrate the posts this week have been a little more challenging than usual…Not to mention YouTube clips. ]

I think that the organizing question for this week is:  “When is a murder ballad not a murder ballad?”   You will see that the song is formally a ballad, and that the story most decidedly includes a murder, but you may have reason to think by the end of our discussion that the parts do not equal the whole.  So first we should move to the song.  

The Story

“William Taylor,” under its various titles, gives us a tale of two true lovers.  (This will be a bit of a blow-by-blow; for a more succinct summary, you can check the Traditional Ballad Index.)  There’s considerable variation in the details, but the essentials are the same.  William (or Willie or Billy) Taylor and Sarah (Sally or Susan) Gray (or Dunn) are the lovers, but some time in their romance, perhaps as they are about to be married, perhaps right after they are, William is pressed into military service (as a soldier or a sailor, depending on the version).  

Sarah, who in some versions is abandoned by her family, eventually decides to dress in “man’s array” to find her lost lover.  After some time in her own military service, an on-board skirmish, vigorous exercise, or an accident reveals her breasts.  (Whatever other kinds of variety may appear in the details of the song, all versions are fairly consistent about this part of the episode.)  Revealed, quite literally, she is asked what brought her to become a soldier.  She says that she is looking for her lost lover, and gives his name.  She is told not only where William may be found, but that he will be found with his new bride (who in several versions is described to be of considerable wealth).  She goes to that place, and shoots and kills him immediately, with his new love at his side.  In most versions, as an immediate consequence of this act, she is elevated in rank by the captain, and herself placed in a position of command.

As I mentioned, there are some significant variations in the lyrics.  You can find a collection of about 6 different versions here.  You can find some scanned lyrics from old songbooks in the Bodliean Library collection here.  There is, of course, an extensive discussion of the song, with many versions of the lyrics on mudcat.org.

Patrick Street

Let’s turn to the Irish folk group, Patrick Street, to provide us with a bit of the music to get us started. Their version is one of the few that can be found on YouTube and Spotify.

“William Taylor” by Patrick Street (Spotify)

In this ballad, we find a number of circumstances and themes that we’ve addressed before.  Not only is the scenario an alteration of what brought us “The Demon Lover,” but there are resonances with songs such as “Fair Ellender,” “Young Hunting,” and “Frankie and Johnny.”  But, there are some relevant differences, are there not?  For one, the mood of the song is quite different from all of them, except some of the most rollicking versions of “Frankie and Johnny.”
We’ll get to why that difference emerges in the next post.

The History

Dianne Dugaw

The Traditional Ballad Index site linked above gives the first known date for this song as 1817.  This may be conservative, but not too far off.  In researching this song a bit, I came across Dianne Dugaw‘s Warrior Women and Popular Balladry:  1650-1850.  Dugaw’s book explores the genre of the Female Warrior ballad as a particularly popular form of song in the early modern period.  The dates in her title provide the boundaries for when these songs were generated as popular street music or broadsides.  After this time they became, essentially, artifacts.  Who wrote these songs is usually pretty uncertain, although Dugaw notes that a few have been attributed to Laurence Price, who wrote “James Harris, or the Demon Lover,” which we discussed a few weeks ago.

These songs first started out as hits among the lower tiers of Britain’s social strata, part of a musical street culture and publishing phenomenon of ballads.  They reached their zenith at the turn of the 19th century, when some versions of them or their themes became moved into a broader array of popular and high culture artistic forms (music, opera, theater, etc.).  Dugaw finds some examples of “William Taylor” that appear to be deliberate parodies–either of the genre as a whole, or of the more popular version of the song itself.   In other words, the intent is almost to be “folk music one step removed”–songs that depict, with gentle humor or not, elements of popular musical culture by reenacting it or tweaking narrative details to makes the stories just slightly more unlikely or perhaps absurd.

You can hear an “art song” version of “Bold William Taylor” in the clip below, which presents the lyrics in dialect (lyrics are provided on the YouTube page for the clip), as collected by Percy Grainger.  It’s a form of art song or parlor music that doesn’t particularly appeal to me, but is helpful in pointing out the differences between this approach to the song and those taken by most of the other performers to whom we’ll listen.  It is, for one thing, likely the most consciously ironic.




Folklorist Cecil Sharp observed that, by the time of his collection, “no tune is better known to the average English folksinger than this.”  While we’ve noted before that Sharp has been a little too eager to attribute American songs to English sources, he’s presumably on safer, and definitely more familiar, ground with English performances.  He was doing his collecting in the early 20th century, so despite the drop off that Dugaw notes in the creation of new and original Female Warrior ballads, some of these songs from the genre’s golden age continued in popularity.

Dugaw’s focus across much of her analysis, of course, is how the Female Warrior ballad represents an early modern exploration of social gender roles and expectations.  Some of these songs drew from concrete examples of women discovered to be fighting in the guise of men, but most appear to have been driven by a creative interest in playing around with gender roles during a time of increasing mobility (geographical, if not social mobility) and social change.  We’ll return to this issue in the next post.

In the next post, I’ll push more thoroughly into the conversation that this ballad presents to us between the Female Warrior ballad on the one hand and the murder ballad on the other.  I’ll present a few of my favorite performances of this tune.  Before closing this post, however, I’ll add in what I find to be, in reply to Sharp, some performances by some English folksingers who are significantly better than the average.

Martin Carthy

Martin Carthy can surely lead this list.  The song as he presents it is for all intents and purposes a fine example of English unaccompanied ballad singing (a subtle drone holds the tone underneath Carthy’s performance).

“William Taylor” by Martin Carthy (Spotify)

Jo Freya

Jo Freya provides another English voice for this song, presenting an a cappella duet harmony version.  I can’t tell for certain from the recording, but I believe that she is providing both vocal parts.  (For what it’s worth, this normally bugs me, but doesn’t here.)  We’ll return to Freya in the next post with another Female Warrior ballad she’s recorded.

“Bold William Taylor” by Jo Freya (Spotify)

Bold William Taylor“Bold William Taylor” by Jo Freya (Myspace)

Bill Jones

Finally, I’ll add one more performance, which is probably the first version of this song I heard, but long before I started paying deliberate attention to such ballads–or at least thought about writing about them regularly.  Bill Jones includes “William Taylor” as the opening track on her remarkable recording Panchpuran.  Jones appears to be on a bit of a recording and performing hiatus at the moment.  In her performance of “William Taylor,” Jones incorporates some musical cues as to the street-based ballad source of this song, and a few other voices into the nonsense syllable refrain.  I’ll leave you to speculate about what was on Bill’s mind when she decided to open up her album with a song about a woman defying certain gender expectations.

Coda:  The Return of Macheath?

At the conclusion of our week with “Mack the Knife,” I speculated that the Macheath figure (Mack, or Mackie) would always elude capture and being put to death for his crimes.  Whether this is true for Bertolt Brecht’s rendering, or subsequent re-inventions of the character, it apparently was not true for John Gay’s Macheath, the character from The Beggar’s Opera that was the launching point for Brecht’s work.  

Dugaw’s Warrior Women and Popular Balladry is not exactly a cliffhanger per se, so I don’t believe that I’m giving too much away by noting that her book ends with a chapter on Gay’s sequal to The Beggar’s Opera, Polly.  This latter play represents for Dugaw an exploration of how the Female Warrior figure in music, art, and literature moves between and among ideas of low and high culture, and in Gay’s hands undercuts the distinction between high and low.  For our purposes, it’s useful to note that Polly is the play in which Macheath meets his end, effectively at the hands of the eponymous protagonist, who is herself disguised as a man and a soldier.  This was a bit of an unexpected connection, and draws my last few weeks of posts into an interesting set of connections.

Next up

We’ll put these two ballad genres into a deeper conversation, and ask the question of whether and to what extent “William Taylor” represents our biggest digression from murder ballads of all, and whether and to what extent that might matter.