God Make You Safe and Free
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| Romeo and Juliet – Sir Frank Dicksee, 1884 |
Introduction
What is it about this week’s song, “Matty Groves”, that attracts us so? (If you’re not familiar with the ballad, check out the introductory post for this week first.) It’s surely not the historical context that I covered in my last post; that’s only compelling to some, and then just intellectually so. It is of course *partly* the music itself that moves us, but not wholly. The tunes change and we’re still singing multiple versions of “Matty Groves”, as well as discussing and posting them on the Internet.
What else then?
Well, this story is a sort of allegory of love apart from the history it represents. This is nothing profound to realize of course. Violence, true love, lust, and jealousy are universal themes in the arts. Ah, I can hear you now… “Yes, yes… so “Matty Groves” and Romeo and Juliet have some things in common besides their historical roots. So what?”
So, I see “Matty Groves” as a powerful allegory that worked for both men and women, and quite differently for each through time. That’s what gives it its staying power in my humble opinion. “Matty Groves” may have started as a news story from Westmorland (as discussed in both earlier posts), but it turns into a multipurpose, psychological tool that worked for people from Scotland to Jamaica, from Newfoundland to the Mexican border. And now, well… it certainly works for me at least.
(Can a song be a psychological tool, beyond its lyrics’ overt or implied meaning? If you don’t already know the answer from personal experience, or even if you do as I suspect, I draw your attention to Ken’s truly remarkable post about how “Down in the Willow Garden” helped him channel his feelings at the death of one taken too young, and gave rise to this blog.)
Anyway, you couldn’t reenact Romeo and Juliet in a Kentucky cabin full of hungry kids while your husband was off hunting, or at the still. You could sure as hell sing though, maybe even the same song your husband was singing out in the woods while taking his ease away from you. And you could both be singing a song Shakespeare himself might have heard!
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| Leila – Sir Frank Dicksee, 1892 |
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| An Offering – Sir Frank Dicksee, 1898 |
Sung one way, Lord Barnard is the aggrieved one and his lady and Musgrave are lustful sinners who get what they deserve. Sung another way though, Musgrave and the lady are true lovers and Lord Barnard is the wicked one, full of jealousy and greed.
It’s really two songs in one.
There you go again… “But wait, in your first post you said the core narrative is consistent over time and geography. How can this then be two different songs?”
Yes, I did claim that about the narrative and it’s demonstrably true. There is no significant divergence here as there was with “Two Sisters” / “Wind and Rain“. But rationalizers, you’ll recall, need not change much of a song to get it to conform to their outlook. Aesthetics can be part of that as well. So… How can one song be two songs and still tell the same story? It’s all in subtle lyrical variation, how one sings it, and in the tune itself.
“How do you like my fair lady that lies in your arms and sleeps?”
That we may shun this wicked vice and mend our lives apace. (Child 81C, verse34)
At worst, and undeniably, it justifies violence as the remedy.
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| The Nightmare – Henry Fuseli, 1781 |
That’s quite a bit of dark imagination applied to one scene in one ballad down through the years. Such violence seems nightmarish, but of course represents something all too real and not uniquely English. For most American men whether in the original colonies, on the expanding frontier, or among the farms and settlements left in its wake, control of a wife sexually and otherwise was paramount. In any patriarchal society, an unfaithful wife is a perceived threat both to personal honor and economic stability. Here we see a song that, sung a certain way, reinforces all that and implicitly offers a lesson in corrective action.
"Woe be to the little foot page and an ill death may he die..."
But American women at least as often as men passed down ‘love songs’ such as this through their families. One might argue that male dominance still would have been the core theme even in such circumstances; a bitter life lesson from mother or grandmother to young girls. However, it is also reasonable that such a ballad *can* represent much more, from romantic fantasy to a celebration of defiance.
Does this ballad offer more then? I think so, for both men and women. Some versions evoke empathy with the lady stuck in a loveless marriage made to consolidate land and power. They hold Musgrave’s and Lady Barnard’s love as the higher good. I think it’s quite clear and no accident! People (no doubt men and women both) rewrote it that way for a reason. Doc Watson’s version is one example, or did you forget that final verse sung by the lady?
“You can dig my grave on a pretty green hill. Dig it wide and deep.
And put little Matty Groves in my arms, Lord Daniel at my feet.”
This is an obvious reworking of the last verse in so many other versions wherein the Lord orders the lovers buried, with Musgrave at his lady’s feet because of her noble rank. Ah, rationalization! (And again you see this formula, or ‘floating verse’, in some versions of “Fair Ellender“, clearly to indicate the “rank” of true love over the traditional marriage for the consolidation of land and power.)
So, are there other versions that hold the illicit romance above the marriage? Yes!
A wonderful example of this comes to us from Nic Jones, long about the same time (in the era of ‘Free Love’, interestingly) that the popular Fairport Convention version made the scene.
As with the latter, Nic Jones’ lyrics are clearly traditional and do not represent a wholesale post-modern rewriting. The empathy was there long ago. Jones though adds something aesthetically new, explaining in the liner notes to his 1970 album Ballads and Songs…
“Musgrave‘s tune is more a creation of my own than anything else, although the bulk of it is based on an American variant of the same ballad, entitled “Little Matty Groves”.“
Lyrics for Nic Jones – “Little Musgrave”
You can also hear an *incredible* cover by John Wesley Harding, from his album honoring Jones.
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| Paolo and Francesca – Sir Frank Dicksee, 1894 |
She’s cast a look on the Little Musgrave
as bright as the summer sun.
And then bethought this Little Musgrave,
“This lady’s love I’ve won.”
“Good-day good-day you handsome youth.
God make you safe and free.
What would you give this day Musgrave
to lie one night with me?”
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“Lord Barnard’s to the hunting gone
and I hope he’ll never return.
And you shall slip into his bed
and keep his lady warm.
There’s nothing for to fear Musgrave,
you nothing have to fear.
I’ll set a page outside the gate to watch ’til morning clear.”
The mistake here is not their tryst. It’s picking the wrong guy to be the lookout!
Ok, wait – we’re not done with this one yet… Christy Moore of the band Planxty apparently found an old copy of the ballad in an auction house in Dublin, and he and his buddy Andy Irvine joined this slightly different set of lyrics to Jones’ tune.
For my money, of all the versions we’ve heard, this live one from 2004 is the most superb.
Watch Christy’s face as he sings.
“Little Musgrave” – Planxty (Spotify)
The End?
Where does this all leave us then? Artistically, we really get the best of both worlds today, as the seminal Fairport Convention version tends towards the masculine perspective and the equally important Jones version towards the feminine. Both are, by far, the most commonly covered versions today, as you can tell by browsing this Spotify playlist.
If you haven’t had enough yet, or you don’t really think what I’m saying about ‘two songs in one’ here is true, do a little study of your own of the subtle differences in the lyrics and let’s discuss!
Compare these two ‘Jones’ versions and Doc Watson’s to some of the others we’ve heard here and in the original post. It’s not black and white of course, but the subtleties I think do follow some differing patterns in these areas-
1. The way Musgrave and the Lady meet, how they speak to one another initially and how they come to the decision to be together.
2. The portrayal of the foot page who reveals their tryst. (This I think is quite interesting, Jones’ version being the one that really gets me.)
3. The warning Musgrave ignores and how it comes to pass. (Go to Planxty’s video for a nice take on this one, starting around 3:30)
4. The confrontation: how Musgrave answers when questioned by Barnard and likewise how Lady Barnard answers her husband over Musgrave’s dead body. (These are among the most emotionally packed lines in all versions.)
Or if you’re all folked up with this mess and need a break, maybe just ask yourself which version you’d rather sing or hear, and why.