Murder Ballad Comedy, Part 5: “Marrow Bones”
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“Make him sup them all…”
Don’t worry. There is not much to be gained by a deep historical dive on this one, at least in terms of sussing out varieties of meaning. Rather, the point of doing a quick review is understanding that this ballad spread far and wide over centuries using the same comic mechanism in every iteration. This joke is, in other words, an international classic. As well, some of those versions are fun to hear, and quite different from Ennis’s. So, bear with me for a paragraph or so and I’ll get to some more music.
G. Malcolm Laws cataloged this ballad in the mid-20th century as “The Old Woman of Slapsadam,” identified as ‘Q2’ in his labeling system. The Roud Folksong Index today calls it ‘Roud No. 183‘ with just over 200 entries at the time of this blog entry. The variety of ballad titles is overwhelming. The Traditional Ballad Index calls it “Marrowbones,” and gives us a clear sense of the ballad group’s geographic range. We have no record of it in print before a reference in Chapter 3 of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1874), but it’s surely older and was collected throughout the British Isles, eastern Canada, and most of the continental United States.
The Mainly Norfolk website effectively catalogs and summarizes most of the key recordings. If you check out my Spotify playlist at the bottom of the post, you’ll hear quite a few versions all doing the same thing. There are professionally produced recordings of course, perhaps the most well known being Steeleye Span‘s (1971.) The Clancy Brothers’ version is probably the most famous from the Emerald Isle, but there are several other Irish variants worth a listen. I want finish today though by highlighting a few traditional (more or less) examples outside of Ireland to show geographic scope, lyric similarity, and near identity of narrative.
Let’s start with one from Scotland. This is one of the best, for my money.
Now one each from the north and the southeast of England, respectively.
Of course we can’t forget about the Americas – Newfoundland first…