The Farmer’s Curst Wife / Little Devils
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“Oh the women they are so much better than men!”
Misogyny is part of what we must always deal with here at MBM, even with comic ballads. You may recall our Murder Ballad Comedy series – the entry I added wasn’t so funny when it came to women, though the songs were meant to be jovial when performed. Likewise, if you dig into the many versions of “The Farmer’s Curst Wife”, you can see that there is a clear strain of misogyny underlying the obvious attempts at humor. The wife is a virago whom even the Devil can’t subdue.
One can rightfully argue that such humor at the expense of wives is at least one reason for the song’s ability to endure. In 1974, scholar Mary Ellen B. Lewis even cited the song as one of many examples of “forceful, negative, traditional” material still ripe for attack by feminists in the study of folklore. However, the point of that article is more nuanced – “Indeed, the feminists, like everyone else, borrow, create, and use folklore, some of which they would employ to alter the world in which they live.”
Aha! Cue Jean Ritchie – 1976. Here is her introduction to the song “Little Devils” from that concert. (Thanks to Rich Warren for providing a copy of the track so I could transcribe her stage banter.)
Gonna do you a cornfield song, I guess…
Well, a cornfield song was what you do in the cornfield when your father’s trying to go back to work. And it’s rest time, you know, so you’re too hot to sing but you wait until the very last minute when he’s about to get ready to go back to work and you’d start a song so that he’ll let you rest a little longer. That was what we did anyway. And the boys were very brave, they would always start the song. And they’d start, they knew what kind Dad liked, he liked short, funny songs. If we sang a ballad or if we sang a church song, or a love song or something like that, why he would not pay any attention to it, he’d just go right on back to work and we’d have to go too. But if we sang one of his favorites, why then he’d listen and he’d sit back down again. So this is one of those songs, this is called “The Little Devils.” It was a song that my father said some woman had changed the ending on because where it’s supposed to say “worse” we made it say “better”. By ‘we’ I mean the girls in the family. And there were eleven girls born in the family and only three boys, so that we could always outshout the boys at the end. But there was always a shouting match at the end anyway, you see. They always tried, they never learned!
Fascinating. Given what we see in the old English roots of the ballad, Balis Ritchie was no doubt right about someone changing the words at the end, but he was saying more than he could have known. The song had been adapted far and wide to reinforce women’s pride and strength, as several examples in the playlist above suggest. One can hardly imagine a more authentic demonstration than the one Jean describes – sisters literally shouting down their brothers with their declaration of strength. Those girls knew they could even whip the Devil! What chance did the boys have?
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen such Appalachian ‘folk feminism’ in this blog – for example, you may wish to check out Sheila Kay Adams’ version of “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight”. No, there was nothing weak about traditional Appalachian womanhood and it should surprise no one that a ballad which might otherwise be a tool of misogyny in a man’s throat could be easily co-opted by such women. And let’s not ignore the fact that Jean’s father, though he teased about the ending, favored the song and his girls’ show of strength enough to postpone, presumably more than once, his vital work in the fields as the summer sun moved towards the western hills.
Witch riding to the sabbath. From Ulrich Molitor’s Hexen Meysterey, 1545
Of course, it wasn’t just Appalachian women and men that found their way out of the song’s original misogyny. If you’re truly curious about all this, as concerns this ballad as well as many others, I recommend an article by David Atkinson from 1999. It’s much too complex to summarize easily here, and his goal isn’t to provide a feminist focus on gender roles and the like – however the scholarship he summarizes and the original perspective he adds based on his own extensive experience with the ballads certainly sheds light on such things. For example, in relation to that last line that led to shouting matches in the cornfield…
There is, then,a distinct paradox in the characterization of a woman who has the ability successfully to withstand the Devil, but who is nonetheless stereotyped as a “curst,” “scolding,” or plain “bad” wife. Some of the aphoristic stanzas which conclude the ballad, and which have the appearance at least of belonging more to the singer than to any of the characters, perpetuate this paradox. Among them are diametrically opposed couplets: “You see the women is worse than the men,/ If they get sent to Hell, they get kicked back again”; and ‘The women they are so much better than men,/ When they go to hell they’re sent back again.” A first glance might suggest that there should be a preference for one or other of these endings in line with the gender of the singer, but that is not clearly so… In fact, “The Farmer’s Curst Wife” allows a considerably more ambivalent engagement with different kinds of power manifest amongst women than is contained in such neat conclusions.
It is dense stuff, but well worth the time to read if that’s your cup of tea. However, if music will suffice for you, I hope you’ll be satisfied as I finish with one more example – this time from Ireland. Please, though, do go back and check out the playlist. There are incredibly diverse examples there!