Note: This is Part 2 of a 4 part series – see also Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4

We saw in the introductory post for the week that in the murder ballad “Edward“, or Child 13, at least as sung in America and Ireland the murder is sparked by an argument about the cutting of a sapling or a bush.   But what does *that* mean?  Why would anyone be arguing about a sapling in the first place?  And does the same hold true for versions in England and Scotland? (If you hit this page without knowing the ballad, or are just looking for multiple versions of “Edward” and not for a long-winded exploration, I suggest the introduction linked above will be far more useful.)

Nic Jones recorded the ballad for his second album, and in the liner notes he gets right to the point.

“This is more or less a version of a large group of songs under the various titles of Edward, Lizzie Wan, Lucy Wan, What Blood is This?, etc. In this version the whole incident turns on the seemingly irrelevant statement:

It’s all about a little holly bush that might have made a tree.

The lines are possibly explained by a glance at some of the other versions, where the son has made love to his sister and subsequently killed her when she turns out to be pregnant. The holly bush could reasonably represent some kind of guarded reference to this incident; the incident itself having been excluded from the song.”

So the holly bush is a euphemism, maybe.  And “Edward” is a version of “Lizzie Wan”, maybe.  With Jones’s reading then, Edward must kill his brother either in rage for his horrid violations of their young sister, or because he loved her too and was jealous.

Anyway, here’s Jones’ version, performed with typical excellence by John Wesley Harding on his album in tribute to Jones.

“Edward” – John Wesley Harding (Spotify)

Lyrics for the Jones/JWH version

Our recent adventures with “Pancho and Lefty” suggest that you can’t necessarily trust a folk singer to know the meaning of a song!  And of course, we all make our own meanings… yadda, yadda, yadda.  But for what it’s worth, the incest theme with regards to “Edward” has been taken up by scholars as well, and for a good long time. Admittedly, I have a hard time intellectualizing it, or wanting to at least.  But I see the value in doing so in this case.

There is a child between my two sides…

I‘ll get to the scholarship in a minute.  But first judge for yourself if some of these scholars and Nic Jones were on about anything meaningful.  “Lizzie Wan” (Child 51) deserves a week of its own, but in the meantime you can compare.  I offer here a recent and simple recording for clarity’s sake, though you can compare it to Child’s collected variants if you want.

“Lucy Wan” – The Pratie Heads (Spotify)          Lyrics for Lucy Wan by The Pratie Heads

Right.  So now you see it.  Five verses in this version are found in many versions of “Edward”, the only difference being it is the sister killed instead of the brother.  Unlike “Edward”, the horrible motive for the murder is made all too plain – the possibility of a child born to brother and sister.  The only case I’m making here is that Jones et. al. are not out in left field with this incest hypothesis, so I’m going to let that rest with only one traditional example.  You can dig more, but you’ll see these folks clearly have a point. There is more than just a passing similarity between “Edward” and “Lucy Wan”, and with incest so clearly the theme of the latter, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the former might have something to do with it as well.

What’s a ‘kenning‘, Kenneth?

Now to the books and articles so we can trace it out.  (Sorry for the lack of music in this bit, but I’ll get back to it soon if you can be patient!  Or, what the hell; just skip the boring stuff and head down the page!  I’ll post a few more awesome performances in my last piece this week too.)

Archer Taylor made “Edward” and its Scandinavian relatives the subject of a thorough book in 1931. He came to some interesting conclusions about the origins of the ballad that I’ll cover a bit below.  However, for our purposes at this moment, we need to know that while Taylor recognized the importance of the argument over the sapling, he felt unable to derive from it the deeper motive for the murder. And he had little hope of doing so in the future; “…Edward, we must remember, has been recovered only in the last stages of decay.”

In 1933 though, Philips Barry in reviewing Taylor’s work took issue with Taylor’s conclusion and instead declared all but certainly (and without much evidence) that “Edward” is a “ballad of fratricide, in which the motive is the love of a pre-nubile girl.”  He claimed that the reference to the “breaking of a little bush” is “a kenning which Cecil Sharp said was interpreted by a singer to refer to a very young girl.”  If true, such a ‘people’s interpretation’ documented by one of the great ballad collectors and scholars certainly lends Barry’s proposition strength.

Barry offered no citation though, and Sharp’s source had not yet been documented as of 2002 (according to Atkinson, referenced below.)  We have no real reason to doubt it; but even granting its veracity, Barry invests an awful lot in this one interpretation reported by Sharp.   I’m no expert, but I researched this thoroughly and found no evidence of a widespread folk interpretation for the murder in this ballad along these or really any other lines, anywhere.  (And how frustrating!  Oh, for the simple motive in “Matty Groves“!)

Barry, in a different part of the same publication, also argued that the pronounced similarities between the mysterious “Edward” and the ballads “Lizzie Wan” and “The Twa Brothers” suggest that they have a common ancestor (William Motherwell had much earlier suggested a general connection), thus implying a common motive for murder in the descendant ballads. We see above that this hypothesis is understandable (though far from proven) when one looks at “Lizzie Wan”.  “The Twa Brothers” is more problematic as Barry has to go out on a limb to infer incest there, but let’s leave that aside for now and give him the benefit of the doubt so we can move forward.  At any rate, right or wrong, when we put it all together we can see the origin of the position that Nic Jones took about that holly bush.

The murder motive

The incest hypothesis was taken up again by Tristram Coffin in his 1949 article “The Murder Motive in ‘Edward’“.  Coffin outlines the scholarship above, and takes some issue with Barry’s broadest claims regarding “Lizzie Wan” and such.  However, he affirms the likelihood of incest as the hidden murder motive in the ballad nonetheless.

Here’s how he gets there.  Coffin begins by verifying Archer Taylor’s conclusions from 1931 about the origins of the ballad; specifically

1. “Edward” is now highly corrupt and much of its original content is missing
2. The ballad is originally British, expanding out first to Scandinavia then later to America, etc.
3. The murder was originally fratricide; all other variants are later.
4. The mother in the original ballad was not involved in any way in the murder, such as in the case in the Percy version (Child’s version B.)

Accepting these, and in light of well-established patterns in the British ballads, Coffin dismisses the idea that the murder could have been based on some rivalry unidentified in the narrative and sparked by a *literal* argument over a sapling. He accepts then that the ‘sapling argument’ is in fact a kenning, and thus sees in that context only two reasonable explanations for the fratricide; sexual jealousy over a sweetheart, or over a sister.  The former, Coffin argues, would not require euphemism.  It’s a common theme in ballads and in no need of being hidden.  Incest though is different, and “is a motif that has consistently tended to drop out of ballad plots…  Incest is the one motif most likely to be euphemized by the folk.”

To tie his case together, Coffin goes back to “Lizzie Wan”, “The Twa Brothers”, and a few other ballads that are either explicitly about incest or can reasonably be suspected of being so in their primal forms.  He tries to make no sweeping claims like Barry’s, but in comparing these to “Edward” finds a number of “startling” parallels that convince him incest is indeed the likely motive for murder in “Edward”.  (Honestly, that part of his article still feels sweeping to me, but at least he tries to offer evidence and logical argument where Barry offers only a bit more than declaration.) Whether one brother kills the other because both love their sister romantically, or because one is horrified at what the other has done, Coffin concludes is impossible to know.

Are we there yet?

Sorry, not quite…  But at least in this bit we’ll get back to some musical examples, and these surprisingly without the sapling.

If all this sounds interesting but a little shaky to you, you’re not alone.  In 2002, David Atkinson took on the topic once again in Chapter 4 – “Incest and Edward” in his book The English Traditional Ballad.  As they say on Facebook, ‘it’s complicated’; you’re much better off reading his work to get the full picture.  But let me see if I can’t give you the skinny, while delivering some performances to boot.

Atkinson in the end makes the point, I think, that trying to find incest as the irrefutable motive for murder in “Edward” misses the mark.  It’s not an unreasonable possibility, and he thoroughly explores and even bolsters some of the evidence given by earlier scholars.  But he concludes that the whole hypothesis ultimately rests on self-reference to the collected scholarship on the topic, starting with Barry, and on speculative comparisons with other ballads like “Lizzie Wan”.  Take Nic Jones’s liner notes above as an example (which Atkinson cites as well.)

He observes that if you change the light in which you look at “Edward”, you can come up with entirely different motives for the murder.  And this is not just theoretical.  Some traditional singers see the motive either as mysterious at best, or as something other than incest entirely.  Atkinson would not have us dismiss these alternative readings.

He references, for example, the 1976 performance of “Edward” by Frank Hinchliffe, of Sheffield.  It’s quite moving actually, or it feels so to me.  Typical of some other English versions, the spark for the murder is *not* a sapling, but the killing of birds.  Here are the lyrics for Hinchliffe’s version, as sung in the oddly filmed YouTube clip below. The lyrics page also has a link to an mp3 version.

Atkinson points out that the album notes for Hinchliffe’s version of “Edward” state “Frank quite understandably is not at all happy with the story in his version as it stands; it is hard to see the killing of three birds as sufficient motive for fratricide.”

He notes as well that a relative of Hinchliffe’s also sang the ballad and defended the senselessness of the fratricide by citing local murders that made little more sense.  The killing of birds may be euphemism, but apparently the folk around Sheffield at least didn’t see incest as part of the fabric of this ballad, and could more or less live with its ambiguity.

But this isn’t limited to England. Atkinson cites in this regard the well-known performance of one of the great Scots ballad singers, Jeannie Robertson.  In Scotland the ballad is known as “My Son David”.  Robertson’s performance is most excellent; it was in fact her signature ballad.  I’ve posted a shorter version here, but several others are recorded.  The differences in her performances of this ballad over the years are a subject of scholarship unto itself.

Jeannie Robertson – “My Son David” (Spotify)

Lyrics for “My Son David” – Jeannie Robertson

(Here’s a YouTube version I stumbled across that is styled after a longer version of Robertson’s, with some additional verses along the lines of what we’ve seen in other lyrics.)

Robertson’s and some (though not all) related Scots versions ascribe a different motive for the murder.  The older brother kills the younger because the younger would not submit to the eldest’s authority.  And there’s more!  In some more developed variants, the younger first draws his sword.  Atkinson quotes Robertson from an interview where she addresses the question directly as to why one brother murdered the other.

Jeannie Robertson – Photo by Ian Whitaker

“The thing was that David was oldest and he was heir to everything, and the other brother was a very selfish, jealous brother.  He wanted for nothin’, he had everything too.  But he didnae want that.  He wanted to be the master, you see, o’ the castle or fat ever it was.  And he wanted to kill his brother and become master.  So his mother likit David even better than fat she likit the other one.  So when he tried to kill his brother, well, of course, it was a natural thing for David to fight to defend his sel’.  So he killed his brother.”

Of course it’s not just scholars that can read into a ballad!  You can see where this all might go.   Atkinson cites interpretations, albeit not scholarly, wherein the story in “Edward” is seen essentially as a retelling of the stories of “Cain and Abel” and “Jacob and Esau“.  (Remember, in my first post I told you it could be “Cain and Abel” if you want.)

Now, I’m sure I’m not doing justice to the depth of Atkinson’s work in his chapter, much less the whole book to which the chapter is more than just literally bound.  I’m oversimplifying, certainly.  But we’re not doing this blog for scholars; it’s for passionate amateurs like us.

Archer Taylor in 1931 kept this bit simple, and understandably posited that we just can’t know why the murder happens in “Edward”.  Atkinson though tries harder and comes to a more satisfying conclusion, at least for someone who likes to sing these songs.  His final paragraph is too long and academic to quote here, but what it comes down to is this.  All of this ambiguity, these competing interpretations, the self-referential scholarship and such…  it all  “allows for the re-creation of meaning at every encounter with a ballad.”

Understanding this “inherent instability in meaning”, he argues, is more important than trying to figure out precisely what the ‘meaning’ might be of a ballad.

Given all I’ve written above, I think I understand why he chose “Edward” to make this broader point.

(Note: This week’s exploration, and Atkinson’s point particularly, inspired a personal response from me too, here.)

Coda

Who else is finding new meaning in these old lyrics, or rewriting the ballad wholly to find such?  Here are two quick examples (one from each side of the pond) with which to close, to make up for the lack of music above.

New England’s own Cordelia’s Dad released an excellent interpretation in 1995, calling it “The Sun and the Moon”.  The lyrics are the same as Sam Amidon’s that I included in my first post this week, and may be his source.  Whether this version itself was arranged by Cordelia’s Dad or is a traditional set of lyrics I don’t know yet, as I don’t have the liner notes for their album.  (Anyone out there have it?)  Here’s a snippet of it on YouTube.

“The Sun and The Moon” – Cordelia’s Dad (Spotify)

“The Sun and the Moon” (lyrics)

And finally, what Child Ballad can be called properly ‘reinterpreted’ until covered by Steeleye Span?  They rewrite it completely and structure it like a ‘rock anthem’.  It works, though personally I find it a bit much.  Anyway, Edward kills his brother in this one for “telling lies”.  I’ll leave it to you in comments below to speculate as to what he’s lying about!

“Edward” – Steeleye Span (Spotify)    YouTube version

Steeleye Span’s “Edward” lyrics