Found Drowned – George Frederick Watts, 1867

All right folks.  I promised after five separate posts over six months concerning the ballad “Two Sisters” (aka Child 10, aka Roud 8, aka…) that this time I’d have something meaningful to say about it.

Let me link first to the other posts I’ve made for reference, in case you happen to be starting with this one.  What I will write below this list assumes a familiarity with the ballad.


1. Two Sisters / Wind and Rain – Basic introduction to the ballad’s historical context and three main variants (the two in the link title, plus “Binnorie”.)
2. I’ll Be True Unto My Love – A helpful, detailed way to think about the folk process and how it can create so many diverse variants of a ballad like Child 10.
3. Bow and Balance to Me – My conclusions and personal reactions to the three variants, and some speculation about jealousy, flirtation, and the role of the refrains in the “Two Sisters” variant.
4. Two Sisters Redux – Part 1 –  A sampler of excellent examples of variants I did not consider in my first posts, including “Cruel Sister”, “The Bows of London”, and various Scots examples such as “The Swan Swims so Bonny O”.
5. Two Sisters Redux – Part 2 – A sampler of excellent examples of “Two Sisters” and “Wind and Rain” variants, and an unsatisfactory look at the origins of both.
6. This one!
7. Addendum 1 – Looking at a new traditional version of the ballad on YouTube from Sheila Kay Adams
8. Two Sisters at the Movies – A post on the wonderful short film that recreates this ballad!

Sometimes she sank…


Right – I said I’d have something intelligent and insightful to say about it all. But I’m not sure that I do, at least not something intellectual.  I’m pretty good at using my brain for this sort of thing. But trying to use it to get somewhere satisfactory with this ballad is like bobbing and gasping for air while being swept down river, knowing the waves will soon enough swallow me whole.


Let me show you just one example of what I mean.  Here I’ve been collecting this Spotify playlist of recordings of Child 10, of which I’m getting rather proud at 76 tracks and counting (some of which are only resident on my home computer; sorry! Here’s my YouTube playlist too.) Then, while pulling threads online to see what other connections I could unravel, I found…

Go ahead, click on it.  It won’t hurt you or your computer.  Then just click on ‘010 The Twa Sisters’ over there on the left.  It’s ok, I’ll wait…. 


See what I mean?  These folks (seems to be only a couple maybe?) have compiled and are keeping current a database of recorded Child Ballads that exceeds 10,000 entries.  The list for Child 10 alone weighs in at 403 separate recordings.  (Yes, I counted them by hand.)   So, anyway, hey…  I’ve  got 76 for you!  You know how that feels…

I don’t mean to whine.  We do more here than just catalog ballads and compile Spotify playlists, and I’m proud of that.  And no one pushed me in to this particular river named Child 10.  I jumped with both feet!  Why? 


I’ve been compelled to keep coming back to this song since the first time I heard Garcia and Grisman picking and singing “Wind and Rain”.  It’s just so delightfully creepy! Then my compulsion deepened years later when I heard my wife sing Clannad’s “Two Sisters” to sing my son to sleep and flashed “That’s the same song!”  


(And I *love* that experience of realizing that some weird tune is actually a variant of something quite old, or that something about the tune I’m listening to connects in some strange way to something entirely different.  Like this; listen for a minute to the tune of Jock Duncan’s “Bonnie Mill Dams O’Binnorie”. Really listen, and tell me if that sure enough isn’t the tune to the traditional “Jesse James” and thus “Jesus Christ” by Woody Guthrie.  That one hit me back in January during my original MBM dip into Child 10.  Am I wrong?)

Self Portrait as a Drowned Man – Hippolyte Bayard, 1840

I’m not a folklorist or other sort of scholar; so, for example, even if I’m right about the tune of “Jesse James”, I can’t do much with that knowledge.  I’m like an eight year old sneaking in to  Daddy’s car.  And to do justice to this most ancient of ballads, one needs to do more than just sit behind the wheel and pretend to drive – someone really needs to make it the subject of a solid book every generation or two.  There’s just *that much*.  Lay that on top of what we all know to be true about the futility of being declarative regarding the meanings of these ballads, and its enough to turn any gregarious folk music blogger into a humbled hermit who occasionally posts anonymous rants in odd fora across the Internet.


But, hey, I’ll try.  Just forgive me if I stray from the intellectual and go for a different sort of insight.


Sometimes she swam…


In my posts six months ago I only gave serious consideration to three main variants; “Two Sisters”, “Wind and Rain”, and “Binnorie”.  I still think that it’s a helpful set to compare in that the first two represent what seems to be a cleaving of the older “Binnorie” into halves; “Two Sisters” an almost ‘crime novel’ telling of jealousy and murder without the magical retribution, and “Wind and Rain” focusing on the gore of the murder and the magical retribution.  And we established that older versions of the ballad including its Scandinavian ancestors, usually tell the whole story – motive, murder, and magic.


But, that’s hardly the whole picture – it’s all just too simple.  Now that we’ve got at least four more major variant families in our sample (and that’s not comprehensive), the complex possibilities are overwhelming.  There’s no clear chronological linearity either.  It’s not like the ‘whole story’ variants died out and we’re only left with truncated ones.


Maybe one could create a chart to compare the key narrative elements among, say, just six major variant families in English.  But even that is a daunting task.  Consider some of those elements.  Where did the sisters’ family live?  What was their social rank?  Does the daughters’ skin pigment matter?  Who woos the eldest/youngest, and what gifts does he give?  etc. etc. etc…  I mean, I’m not even in to the third verse!  We’ve got millers and swans and fiddlers and fools and magical instruments and strange refrains to consider, and more.

Binnorie – John D. Batten, illustration for “English Fairy Tales”, 1911

And where would it get us?  It’s interesting stuff to think about on some level, but really it misses the deeper point. This ballad evoked and continues to evoke layers of meaning about the human experience for countless diverse groups of folks.  That’s why we keep coming back to these songs after all, even in this age of digital music, distracted though we might get with the rest of it.


So, what insightful thing do I have to say about it all? We know this song is at least five hundred and maybe even closer to a thousand years old.  It’s still being perpetuated, and creatively so.   And it’s not hard to see that the changing narrative elements fit themselves to the appropriate place as over time the ballad spreads and is reborn.  The core of the ballad itself is pure and deep, flowing in many branches through a vast forest, giving rise along the way to intense variegation that should humble even the most detail oriented scholar.  I’m starting to think that “Two Sisters”, still going strong, is the great mother murder ballad of them all.


Here it is then, and maybe this is why I’m not a ballad scholar.  I don’t want to spend a lifetime studying the many versions of “Two Sisters”.  I want to spend a lifetime hearing and singing them.

They all perceived that the water was clear…

Tim Eriksen

I can’t leave it without giving you at least one new track to hear.  

Tim Eriksen recorded a version of “Two Sisters” that doesn’t neatly fit in to any of the broad categories I’ve been exploring.  But he didn’t fix it up that way – in fact, he’s a perseverator in this case who faithfully reproduces Lee Monroe Presnell’s 1951 recording of “Two Sisters that Loved One Man” from Beech Mountain, North Carolina.  

The magical retribution isn’t there, but neither is the beaver hat, the miller’s greed, or any justice for the killer.  The refrain is unique.  But in this one, it’s just boiled down pure as can be.  Jealousy, murder, and a last line to really make you feel it deep.  

We could talk about it as a unique example of what happens to Child 10 in America.  

Or, you can just play it and let it move you in beauty.