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| Portrait by George Romney (not that George Romney) |
[April 1, 2013] A truly exciting day here at Murder Ballad Monday! A new discovery!
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| William Cullen Bryant |
Hidden away in an obscure volume of poetry collected by William Cullen Bryant is the seemingly innocuous love poem, “Anne Hathaway.” It’s attributed, if you can call it that, to an anonymous author. Through the work we’ve done here at the blog over the past sixteen months–from January of last year up to today, this first day of April, we’ve been able to piece together the clues that have uncovered several startling revelations about this hitherto obscure poem. It is, we believe, a murder ballad in disguise; and not only that, we believe that it is a keystone work in the evolution of murder balladry, and a piece that has been reinterpreted, revised, confabulated, and integrated into later, highly influential popular pieces that also shed light on the broader tradition. Plus, we find an even deeper disguise with the help of some insightful scholars. But that’s a little later.
It’s a little bit of a break from our modus operandi, but I propose to give a close reading of this enigmatic piece, and explain its influences on the broader tradition. Along the way, we’ll find that it represented an important moment in the cultural transcendence of gender stereotypes and Catch-22’s of women’s success in an earlier era. It may be challenging to understand in this day and age when such sexist forces are behind us for good (Thank goodness!), but we’ll do our best to unpack it. And, we’ll also see traces of this song flowing down through the folk music and murder ballad tradition–reaching Bob Dylan, of course, and even Jackson Browne!
First the full text:
Anne Hathaway
To the idol of my eye and the delight of my heart, Anne Hathaway
Would ye be taught, ye feathered throng,
With love’s sweet notes to grace your song,
To pierce the heart with thrilling lay,
Listen to mine Anne Hathaway!
She hath a way to sing so clear,
Phoebus might wondering stop to hear.
To melt the sad, make blithe the gay,
And nature charm, Anne hath a way;
She hath a way,
Anne Hathaway;
To breathe delight Anne hath a way.
When Envy’s breath and rancorous tooth
Do soil and bite fair worth and truth,
And merit to distress betray,
To soothe the heart Anne hath away;
She hath a way to chase despair,
To heal all grief, to cure all care,
Turn foulest night to fairest day.
Thou know’st, fond heart, Anne hath a way;
She hath a way,
Anne Hathaway;
To make grief bliss, Anne hath a way.
Talk not of gems, the orient list,
The diamond, topaz, amethyst,
The emerald mild, the ruby gay;
Talk of my gem, Anne Hathaway!
She hath a way, with her bright eye,
Their various lustres to defy, —
The jewels she, and the foil they,
So sweet to look Anne hath a way;
She hath a way,
Anne Hathaway;
To shame bright gems, Anne hath a way.
But were it to my fancy given
To rate her charms, I’d call them heaven;
For, though a mortal made of clay,
Angels must love Anne Hathaway;
She hath a way so to control,
To rapture, the imprisoned soul,
And sweetest heaven on earth display,
That to be heaven Anne hath a way;
She hath a way,
Anne Hathaway;
To be heaven’s self, Anne hath a way.
Birds of a feather
Now, those of you who have been with us for a while will surely notice that the rhythm and rhyme of this poem give it away immediately as an ancient murder ballad. Yes, you’ve got it. It’s an early 19th century adaptation of the ancient Finnish folk tune Aprillipäiväsmordaren. You may remember how “Babylon” (Child 14) also borrowed from Finnish sources. This line of Finnish folk music has been filtered through generations upon generations of bards dating back to–oh, roughly–sometime in the early spring of 762 A.D., and reflects a common artistic trope from that time. We’ll flesh that out later this week.
Taking the song stanza by stanza, several other obvious clues show this lyric to be a murder ballad. The opening lines, for instance, refer to “the feathered throng.” If you’ve been reading here for a while, this will instantly signal to you that murder is afoot. As we’ve seen in songs from “Young Hunting” to “The False Sir John,” birds are a common theme within murder ballads, symbolizing not only nature’s witness but, as Pat has so thoughtfully uncovered, the gilded cages which so often confined women of earlier eras.
The second and third stanzas make barely hidden allusions to a catalog of virtues and vices highlighting the ambivalence the protagonist feels for his beloved/intended victim. Envy and avarice take the forefront as the virtues turn to vices in the all-too-transparent subtext of the poem. This will take on additional meaning as we uncover more about this ballad below, but it may need some explaining now. You see, there was a tendency within the culture at the time for the culture, men and women alike, to simultaneously praise and blame women for the very same qualities. This is, of course, completely alien to us nowadays, but was more common at the time, apparently.
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| Lureen Newsome, Ph.D. |
Gender theorist and Western psychologist Lureen Newsome explains that this cultural phenomenon of the time had to do with latent and suppressed homoerotic tendencies within the dominant male population, with rigidly codified notions of masculinity. It had the effect, however, of putting women, particularly prominent women of achievement in a no-win situation, or a trap from which they could not escape, in which the very qualities that made them successful and respectable were paradoxically also the ones that made people doubt their sincerity and virtue. It also could have some negative consequences for the men. Again, happily, these days are long behind us as a society.
The final stanza seals the deal on this piece’s qualifications as a murder ballad. The references to heaven and the implicit construction of the narrator’s unworthiness make clear that the poem is narrating Anne’s demise. Aside from the clear presence of an unreliable narrator (which we’ve heard before), you know where the “You’re too perfect, but I’m no good” dynamic leads. Further textual analysis on our part indicates that the final line is actually a typographical error, and should be written “Anne hath away.”
Mmm-hmm.
Yep.
You got it.
I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you any further.
Is that you, or just a brilliant disguise?
But, don’t despair! There’s more! What first appeared to be a love poem, but then showed itself to be a murder ballad, turns out to be an elaborate social satire and gender critique! There are times when all the hard work of digging into this material provides unexpected rewards.
From the ambivalence between rapturous love and murderous hate, you might guess that this work was created by a male author profoundly caught up in a kind of psychotic attraction, and consumed by the contradictions forced on him by ideals of romantic love and the sexist and archaic (even for then) cultural trope of male “ownership” of women. But, no! Don’t be fooled!
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| Allison Lang, LL.D. |
The poem was at one point attributed to Shakespeare, but this was proved false through a textual comparison that made clear that its subject was not the same as the beloved subject of many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, being decisively more feminine. Extensive linguistic analysis, and some digging on the part of folklore researcher Allison Lang has uncovered that this work is actually an extended satire written by a woman. And Lang believes she knows who, too.
By this time, if you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you have probably already figured it out that it is none other than Madeline Bray, the prominent British stage actress and also the broadside ballad writer, who wrote under the pen-name “Rosie.”
Bray, who was born in Carstairs, Lanarkshire, in lowland Scotland, was well known for her prior career as Admiral of the King’s 6th Fleet (while disguised as a man), and a figure from whom Charles Dickens drew for several of his more colorful characters. Bray herself drew from personal experience as a female warrior (like Sarah Gray in “Bold William Taylor”). Bray achieved her rank by killing her former fiancé, who had jilted her, leaving her for her mother’s second cousin. Disguised as a man (the boatswain’s mate, actually), Bray famously killed her ne’er-do-well former lover through the creative use of a rigging pulley, while their ship, The Unremarkable, was making its way through the Strait of Magellan. Thomas Pynchon later satirized this episode in his novel, Against the Day.
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| Thomas Pynchon |
So, this song ironically is actually Bray’s literary protest against the particular vicissitudes of fame faced by women. She protests the way in which women of prominence and talent are brought down by a culture that finds them threatening, killing them with kindness or a psychologically conflicted adoration which somehow also despises them and wishes they would go away. Unfortunately, as with today’s adage, “satire doesn’t work on the net,” it fared little better within broadside publishing, and the song for many was considered to be an overly sappy love poem with no broader themes. Again, Bray’s point may be even harder for us to understand today, when women of fame and prominence pay no such price for their success.
“Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?”
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The Very Rev. Dr. Andy
Sachs, D.D.S., O.D. |
“OK,” you’re saying, “now where’s the music.” Unfortunately, all extant copies in England were destroyed in a brief and soon forgotten fad of neo-Cromwellianism in the 19th century, in which organizers would arrange multiple small gatherings or “mobs” in areas to burn, mutilate, or otherwise destroy various arbitrarily selected cultural artifacts. Broadsides of “Anne Hathaway” were an early casualty of this very short-lived and quickly hushed-up fad.
A few scant trickles of this song made it over to the United States, where they filtered into the folk music of the emerging nation; which is fortunate for us. Although we haven’t been able to track down the tune yet, our further investigations over the past few months have discovered this song making its way through various interpreters, perseverators, but most commonly confabulators and integrators.
Folklorist Andy Sachs, better known for her studies of satanic themes in popular arts and culture, has argued that traces of the “Anne Hathaway” song can be found in such folk classics as “(Oh My Darlin’) Clementine” and “You Are My Sunshine,” but I’m not sure I can stand behind her assessment.
1966 marked the release of Bob Dylan’s classic “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” with that evocative phrase “who among them do they think could bury you.” Evidence from Dylan’s songwriting collaborators (recently featured here) indicates that Dylan went through several different iterations of the title phrase, dispensing with adjectives like “wide” and “brown,” before settling on “sad.” While the song reprises some of the erotic-homicidal ambivalence of the original, veiling its murderousness with false praise, it’s clear that Dylan (scourer of the arcane bits of legend populating “Old, Weird America” taps in to the traces that point back to Madeline “Rosie” Bray, the Vengeful Admiraless. Long thought to have been written for Sara Lowndes, we have reason to think now, that this song represents Dylan wholly re-creating “Anne Hathaway.”
(I can’t find a YouTube version of Dylan performing the song, but you can listen to Joan Baez’s cover here.)
With your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row
And your magazine-husband who one day just had to go
And your gentleness now, which you just can’t help but show
Who among them do you think would employ you?
Now you stand with your thief, you’re on his parole
With your holy medallion which your fingertips fold
And your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul
Oh, who among them do you think could destroy you?
Full lyrics here.
Yes, the great integrator himself, Bob Dylan, has again completely remade a classic text into a modern classic adapted for a new age.
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| Jackson Browne |
A few years later, California-based singer-songwriter Jackson Browne incorporated part of the “Hathaway”/”Bray” strain in his own confabulated murder ballad, “Rosie.” Appearing as a track on the first side of Browne’s landmark Running on Empty album, “Rosie” invokes bits of Robert Louis Stevenson and later Victorian Jack the Ripper narratives into a dark and sinister tale, in which the protagonist of the song creates a savagely murderous alter-ego, “Rosie,” who sets out to kill the object of his affection in the song. Within the context of this “on the road” style album, we can only surmise, informed by Shaleane’sdiscussion of “Deep Red Bells” that this must also be thought of as a serial murder ballad.
The unrecorded additional verses to “Rosie,” which described the demise of the drummer and the groupie at the hands of the protagonist’s murderous alter-ego, were deemed too unseemly by Asylum Records executives. In the interest of appealing to a more family-friendly demographic, the more puritanical, redacted version that appears on the record leaves the listener with a completely different, and erroneous, impression of what the song is really about.
You can watch a live performance of Browne singing the song here. Lyrics.
Moving into the 80’s, we can find one more trace of this crypto-murder ballad. Already under some scrutiny because his album Graceland slightly undermined the letter (although not the spirit) of the cultural boycott of South Africa during the latter years of the apartheid era, Paul Simon took steps to bowdlerize his song, “Gumboots” to go under the radar of further cultural opprobrium –for it too is a pseudo-murder ballad in the “Anne Hathaway”/”Sad-Eyed”/”Rosie” tradition.
Take some time to listen. The reference to the “friend…having a little bit of a breakdown,” is an early signal of the same kind of destabilized romantic/homicidal ambivalence expressed in the earlier poem. This is reinforced by the constant refrain of “You don’t feel you could love me, but I feel you could,” and the thinly-veiled contempt behind the protagonist’s line “Hey, Señorita, that’s astute.”
Lyrics
Although Dylan, Browne, and Simon don’t seem to be equally or at least fully aware of the song’s origin with Bray, we shouldn’t suppose that they are themselves adopting an antiquated sexism in their songs. In a sense, they implicitly pick up on the “joke,” too, recognizing that the boundaries between virtue and vice, truth and satire, and between murderousness and downright foolishness can be rather thin, any day of the year….
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| Paul Simon (l-r) |
Next up
Later this week, we’ll take this “Anne Hathaway” ballad, or at least its heirs, into the 21st century, when its relevance curiously seems to diminish even further, as the broader culture no longer engages in the kind of passive-aggressive celebrity worship characteristic of earlier eras. In the next post, we’ll listen to “instant classic” performances by Miley Cyrus, Bruno Mars, Kelly Clarkson, Big Time Rush, Taylor Swift, and, of course, Menudo.
By this time, if you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you have probably already figured it out that it is none other than Madeline Bray, the prominent British stage actress and also the broadside ballad writer, who wrote under the pen-name “Rosie.” 
