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“How can you slight me?”

According to John Cohen, “When Carter Stanley heard Roscoe Holcomb sing this backstage at the Chicago Folk Festival, he said, ‘Well, at least we got the words right.'” Though Carter’s reaction points to earlier source material, it also suggests that the Stanleys didn’t first hear the song from Holcomb, and were surprised to hear his version.  And so it was!  In his 2013 book Lonesome Melodies: The Lives and Music of the Stanley Brothers, David Johnson includes numerous interviews with the brothers, and in one Ralph Stanley reveals that they originally got a scrap of the song from an itinerant local workman –

“We got part of that song from a fellow by the name of Otto Taylor…  There used to be the Ritter Lumber Company around here.  We met him at a camp where he lived.  He had part of that song, and we finished it out and claimed it.”

The Stanley’s “finished” version, their third original composition according to Johnson’s research, appeared in early 1948 as the A-side of Rich-R-Tone 423.  They waxed the version linked above as the A-side of Columbia 20590 barely more than a year later.  As you’ll see below as well, this song was in demand!

Rich-R-Tone 423-A

Though the brothers could rightfully call their arrangement their own, the existence of a fragmentary folk song in a lumber camp in western Virginia in the early 20th century must certainly lead to an even older source.  It turns out that, though there is no one murder anyone can cite as the inspiration for the song, we can pretty easily know something definitive about its origin.  And to dispel one assumption immediately, it does not document some sort of uniquely American ‘honor killing’ in Appalachia.  Wrong continent – wrong culture.

A quick search of Waltz and Engle’s Traditional Ballad Index reveals instead southern English origins in a tune, appearing in print by the early 19th century, most often called “Oxford City.” The title is geographically malleable for obvious reasons, and of course there are other variations.  I’ll walk through some notable recorded examples below, but using the TBI as a springboard I was able to compile this 40-plus song playlist.  If you’d rather dive in on your own and skip my curating, then by all means please have at it.  Otherwise, I invite you to the next sections for a deeper dive, and a conclusion that returns to an oft-considered question in this blog, and one which is obligatory this time – “What’s so compelling about a song that blatantly exhibits misogyny?”

“It’s hard, but still it’s honest…”

Image from English broadside ca. 1858 – 1885 – W.S. Fortey, Printer – cataloged as Harding B11 (2901)

The “Oxford City” group of ballads was cataloged by Malcolm Laws in his American Ballads from British Broadsides and is known as “Laws P30.”  The Roud Folksong Index as well identifies the ballad group as #218, with 260 citations at the time of this writing.  It was a popular broadside in southern England in the early 19th century, with well over a dozen examples still extant according to Waltz and Engle.  The earliest printed example of the song is one of those broadsides, from 1828 or 1829, cataloged as Bodleian Harding B 17(230a).

More remarkable than the numerous broadsides that still survive are a number of authentic folk performances of the ballad that stretch back from the the heady days of the Folk Revival to the earliest period of electronic sound recording.  An English folk music site maintained by Reinhard Zierke called Mainly Norfolk contains an entry for “Oxford City” that includes an annotated list of these recordings, most of which can be found in the playlist above.  With that site’s help as well as with that of the sources I mentioned above, I’ll curate the historical and musical highlights.

A wax cylinder produced by composer Percy Grainger in Gramophone’s London studio in July of 1908 captured a performance of “Worcester City” by Joseph Taylor of north Lincolnshire.  Amazingly, it survived to the 1970’s to be remastered with great care.  Thanks to that effort, the recording is most listenable, despite its age.  Taylor’s lyrics, which you can find if scroll to the bottom of Zierke’s page, are closely related to those that Ralph and Carter Stanley found in that lumber camp in western Virginia.

There is also an early American pre-bluegrass example, thanks to the intrepid folklorist Alan Lomax.  In October, 1937, he and his wife Elizabeth recorded Bill Bundy in Manchester, Kentucky singing “Poison in a Glass of Wine.”  His lyrics, again, are similar to the Stanleys’, suggesting of course some common Appalachian ancestor transplanted from Britain.  It’s worth noting, however, that Harry Upton, of Sussex, rendered his traditional performance of a song by the same name for folkorist Mike Yates in early 1970’s.  The lyrics are somewhat different, but it’s undeniably the same narrative with the same title, nearly forty years later and four thousand miles away.  The songs are not nearly as different as one might expect in the instance of a early colonial transmission from the Old World.  It is likely that this is, rather, an early 19th century song, but one that spread quickly.  (The Lomaxes got two other recordings of the same song, which you can find here.)

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