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Baez’s ends like Eriksen’s with the young husband’s death, and no explanation thereof.  Several though include one additional verse, as mentioned above, wherein the widow takes comfort in the fact that she’ll raise their child into a grown man.  Take, for example, this version by the remarkable Fred Jordan of Shropshire.  Though the recording itself is later than Baez’s, 1966, the notes on the back of the album make clear that Jordan learned the song from his mother.  We hear as well yet another tone in his singing; more traditional for sure, and neither melancholy nor upbeat.

Lyrics for “The Bonny Boy” by Fred Jordan

Though there is the additional last verse, these are essentially the same lyrics as Baez’s.  Take away the first verse and you basically have Eriksen’s set of lyrics.  If we treat Burns’s revision as an outlier, almost every example we can find – whether from Scotland, Ireland, England, Nova Scotia, or Connecticut – seems to match up with remarkable lyric consistency.

Coda – “That put an end to his growing”

To sum up, we have a ballad that seems to be at least three to four hundred years old, though does not depend on any specific historical reference for its currency.  It spread widely and endured in the repertoire of traditional singers in England, Ireland, Scotland, eastern Canada and the United States, and even Australia.  Further, it found renewed popularity among singers of the Folk Revival both in America and Britain, and it stays popular today. Where does all this leave us?

Frans Hals – Young Man with a Skull, c.1626 – vanitas, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

It’s a mistake to focus on only one main reason for this song’s persistence and wide appeal.  Folk Revival singers for example probably found something with which to connect in the character of the controlling father.  Did the original writer paint him negatively on purpose?  We can’t know, of course, but it need not have been so.  Though a man controls the woman in the song from start to finish, she does not suffer directly because of her father’s actions.  In all versions she finds both affection and desire for her young groom, and rather quickly at that.  Nature frustrates her by making her wait, and death ends her marriage.

That doesn’t mean the song couldn’t work for rebellious young men and women in the 1960’s.  What may have been a simple fact of life among the gentry when the song was written could easily be recast by later generations as implicit criticism of controlling parents or patriarchy.

On the other hand, this may not be at all why the song remains popular today, in a world where parental control just ain’t what it used to be.  I know it doesn’t resonate with me, at least. So what does?  Obviously this is a love song as well, and no doubt this fact helped make the song attractive over several centuries and continents.  I can’t help thinking, though, that the untimely death of the young groom in the story is also a key factor in the song’s ability to endure.  Again, I know such is the case in my own attraction to the song.

You may think that strange.  I fully admit to being an odd fellow.  Yet I’ve lived long enough now to know that this particular theme ranks right up there with love in capturing our attention across time, geography, and culture.

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…”

In broadest terms, this is a song more or less from the time and place that produced Shakespeare.  It allows a listener to become like Hamlet with the jester’s skull, to see a friend or family member in the character of the strong bonny boy now gone before his time.  Perhaps more to the point, it allows us to see ourselves as we move inevitably towards our ending.

How we deal with all that is as varied as the delivery we see in this song over time.  Mix up parental control, love, and untimely death into a solid ballad and we get that perfect equation for what David Atkinson calls “inherent instability in meaning.”  As my writing partner Ken pointed out to me in discussing the ballad, the lack of specificity with regards to the bonny boy’s death adds to that ‘make it up as you go along’ dynamic.  Most of us no longer live in a world of high infant mortality, plague, or constant warfare.  So one singer in one time treats it as a tragedy, another treats it as matter of fact, and yet another turns it into something almost silly.  None of it is wrong.  It can be perfectly valid with different meanings through the ages.

I suppose one way of seeing this song is that none of it matters.  We all stop growing in the end.  Why bother with all this old mess?  For me, that way doesn’t work.  All of these songs matter to me, and the reason I keep writing about them is simple – the two best ways I have to face my own mortality are to write and to sing.

Thanks for reading and listening this week, folks!