Diver Boy / Young Edwin in the Lowlands Low / Young Emily

Excerpt from a broadside from Durham, England – ca. 1860 – National Library of Scotland

(Note this introduction is Part 1 of our four part series on this ballad. Part 2 takes us to England, Part 3 to Ireland, and Part 4 back to Appalachia.)

Here at Murder Ballad Monday we hope every week to achieve two equally important goals. We strive to curate the best possible musical selection around a chosen song and we try to give you something to think about.

This week’s featured ballad gives us an excellent opportunity to do both. The music and lyrics in almost every variant I can find are compelling. As well, we’ve explored its key theme in depth relatively little. Parental cruelty and its consequences is a vein that shows some fresh promise of color for a dig this week.

It’s English and, though Francis Child never cataloged it, it’s old enough to have been reborn with many names across the British Isles and much of the eastern United States and Canada. In print by 1839, it is likely a few or even several decades older, given its range of dispersal. In Appalachia the ballad is known as “Young Emily” and that’s how I first came to know it. However, it’s also known as “Young Edwin”, sometimes with ‘Edmund’ or ‘Edward’ substituted for ‘Edwin’ or, following the same pattern of nominal variation, “Young Edwin in the Lowlands Low.” Sometimes it’s “The Driver Boy”, or “The Diver Boy.” There are, of course, more appellations as well.

The story though is straightforward and fairly consistent across variants, whatever their title. I have as yet found no evidence of a ‘true life’ source for the narrative, but there’s nothing particularly unbelievable about the murder and its motive, or most other elements really. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much to find a comparably sordid story in the archives of CNN. It’s no stretch to imagine the ballad’s inspiration as a crime somewhere in coastal England – perhaps around the same time as Naomi Wise met her all-too-real fate in America.

A young woman, whose father owns an inn, is in love with a common young man (sailor, driver, diver) who’s just spent several years working to secure a fortune for them both across the water. Upon his return, she meets him and tells him to spend the night at her father’s establishment, but to keep his identity concealed. They plan to run off in the morning and get married. But the young man, usually through drinking, carelessly reveals his wealth (and, perhaps, his identity) before he goes to sleep. The girl’s father, sometimes with other family members, then plans to kill the young man and take his gold. The girl dreams of his death then confronts her father in the morning to find out it had actually come to pass.

The ending shows the most variation; ranging from a conclusion with no consequence past the revelation of the tragedy to one where the girl turns her father in and has him hung before she herself goes insane.

“Where could be that stranger boy…?”

We see this ballad most commonly identified by George Malcolm Laws’ cataloging system as ‘Laws M34‘, and most recently in the Roud Folksong Index as #182 with hundreds of versions currently cited.

But the most recent ‘big name’ recording is where we’ll start today – Natalie Merchant’s “The Diver Boy”, as presented most wonderfully on her 2011 album The House Carpenter’s Daughter. (The album title reminds me; check out Ken’s excellent week with “The House Carpenter” too!)

So turn up your speakers, make sure your sub-woofer is on, and take a deep breath. Let Ms. Merchant tell you a tale of murder most foul.

“The Diver Boy” – Natalie Merchant (Spotify) Merchant’s Lyrics

Though musically distinct, Merchant’s 2011 take seems closely related to Maeve MacKinnon’s 2007 recording of the ballad on her debut album Don’t Sing Love Songs. Both women bring their unique talent and some interesting instrumental artistry to it all.

“The Diver Boy” – Maeve MacKinnon (Spotify) Youtube Link (Lyrics as above and below)

The origin of this variant is not Scottish as one might surmise given Mackinnon’s performance. This is clearly American, and from west of the Mississippi at that. John Quincy Wolf, Jr. recorded Mrs. Ollie Gilbert performing it in Timbo, Arkansas (an area of the Ozarks known for its ballad tradition) in 1959. Max Hunter recorded her ten years later performing an almost identical version.

There is overwhelming correspondence of both lyrics and melody between these field recordings and the two versions above. And, though you’ll have to take my word for the moment, the singularity among all we’ll sample later this week identifies Mrs. Ollie Gilbert’s version of the ballad almost certainly as the source of this 21st century line of professional interpretation.

Mrs. Ollie Gilbert’s Lyrics

The elements of the story as I told it above are here, if sparingly represented. Interestingly, this one lacks an ending that brings justice. In this version Emily is left with nothing but grief – and the listener is left with an open wound.

With or without an ending that satisfies, the fundamental psychological outline of the ballad is entirely clear. We sympathize wholly with the young man and woman and despise her father and brother for their greed and treachery. This is not one of those murder ballads that paints in shades of gray.

Note that piercing line in Mrs. Gilbert’s version – one of the few that doesn’t make it in to either Merchant’s or MacKinnon’s, or even her own 1969 performance – “let’s… send his body sinking face down in the lowland low.” Face down, floating dead in the river; am I reading too much in to think this a purposeful illustration of the father’s and brother’s complete lack of humanity? Better to show than to tell.

Maybe I’m too imaginative when it comes to the details, but looking at it in broad strokes makes clear that almost anyone in the 1830’s would see the same black and white morality as one would today. And it’s not gender specific, for as we’ll see throughout the week, both men and women sing this song most deeply and seemingly look to evoke the same response. Neither does geography radically change the overt meaning of the story. Whether sung near the waters of the White River, the Three Laurels, the Beaulieu River, or Lough Neagh, the moral seems the same.

Greed is *not* good.

“Oh Father, you are a robber…”

I‘m not as interested in the obvious evils of greed and murder as I am in something else. The deepest tragedy of this song isn’t that Emily loses her lover because of greed. It is rather that she loses him to her own parent. What does a father who steals true love from his child represent to a singer in any time or place? There’s definitely something going on there, but these are muddy depths. For one thing, it’s *possible* to read in that the father knew it was *Emily’s Edwin* he killed. However, that takes some imagination as well.

Leaving motive aside for the moment, it’s also not clear to me that a professional musician, like Merchant or MacKinnon, in the post-1960’s West might have the same framework for making meaning of ‘the cruel father’ as, say, an early 19th century English broadside printer or an early 20th century farm girl living in western North Carolina.

And yet, it *must* be part of why this ballad survived in Britain, Ireland, and North America. Admittedly, the strength of my position is to some degree based on personal, anecdotal evidence. Specifically, I recall as a young man first hearing Dellie Norton sing this one on Rounder Records’ High Atmosphere, (which we’ll hear later this week) and I remember my horror and reaction in finally realizing just what the father had done – “Good God!”

Anecdotal, yes; but I’m sure my reaction is common. I don’t suppose I reacted that way just because I was born in a generation that holds rebellion as a requisite rite of passage. It’s something more.

How many British ballads simply didn’t survive much past the trip across the ocean, or the American expanse? How many didn’t survive even at home in Britain? I find the sources I consult when I write for this blog *full* of them. I believe the element of the father’s treachery gave, and gives, this otherwise simple ballad a keen survivor’s edge.

So, what did and does that paternal treachery mean to the singer of this ballad? How does it help this ballad make it across two centuries and thousands of miles? These are the questions with which I’ll wrestle as we move on through the week, starting with a trip to England, then Ireland, and ending back home in the Appalachians by the weekend. I doubt I’ll come to any truly profound conclusions, being neither historian nor psychologist; but I like the idea of exploring it all and giving it a shot.

Coda – “They remind me of my diver boy…”

Let’s leave the heady stuff alone for now and close today with a bit more music, shall we?

We’ll stick with Mrs. Ollie Gilbert’s Ozark version (lyrics, from that later field recording of Gilbert) but take it to Fleetwood, Lancashire and give it a particularly haunting, airy mix of vocals and acoustic instruments, including a crwth! (Yes, I use spell checker, and if you click you’ll have one of the best Scrabble words *ever*.)

Here are Rapunzel and Sedayne (Rachel McCarron and Sean Breadin), a duo of whom I’d not heard until this particular writing project, with a performance of “The Diver Boy” from their 2011 album Songs from the Barely Temple.

Enjoy! And if you do, I hope you tune in later this week for more.

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