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Who’s really guilty here? Or, if it’s not Scottish…

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Here we have Ewan MacColl’s version of Child #73, from his Classic Scots Ballads.  Thanks, Pat, for mentioning it.  The song is sung in Scots, and there are a few passages which I have yet to understand clearly, but the gist of the narrative and its differences with “Fair Ellender” are clear.


Lord Thomas and Fair Annie (Child #73)  (Spotify)


MacColl is joined in this performance by Peggy Seeger, who was romantically involved with Seeger for 30 years or so, and his wife from 1977 until his death in 1989.  


MacColl’s liner notes for this song, written in 1961, are interesting in pointing out the variation between this version, which in some respects wouldn’t obviously qualify for inclusion in this blog, and the other, perhaps later and more American version I first posted:


“Child thought the Scottish version of this ballad included in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, was ‘one of the most beautiful of our ballads, and indeed of all ballads.’  The validity of Child’s evaluation is borne out by the continued popularity of this ballad both in Britain and America.  There are two forms of this ballad, the first telling how the preferred girl is slain by her rival, and the other relating that she dies of grief on the night of the wedding.  The latter form seems to hail from Northeast Scotland.  I learned the ballad in fragmentary form from my mother and collated her version with stanzas from Gavin Greig’s Traditional Ballads and Airs.”


With this twist, the death here is one of grief rather than of violence.  In that light, the ballad becomes thematically closer to ballads like “Anachie Gordon” and “Barbara Allen.”  


I’m left to wonder how these two variations, one vividly violent, the other rather romantic, function differently in the mind of the listener.  In the version sung by MacColl here, the brown girl commits no crime.  Lord Thomas is the one whose decisions, and perhaps his callousness, lead to the broken-hearted death of Fair Annie.  Fair Annie, for her part, makes clear to to Lord Thomas that he can’t have things both ways, and tells him as she sends him on his way, that he must prove constant to his new bride.  


It’s my sense that this version, although less vivid and violent, makes it clearer that it is fundamentally Lord Thomas’s betrayal, whether of Fair Annie/Ellender or of himself, that is responsible for the deaths.



Related posts:

  1. “He’s dressed himself in silk so rare.”
  2. Two Sisters Redux – Part 1
  3. A bit older this time, perhaps
  4. Fair Ellender

Comments

Who’s really guilty here? Or, if it’s not Scottish… — 8 Comments

  1. When I drift off listening to this song my thoughts are always with the Brown girl. She is the only one I ever “become.” Maybe it’s because she’s a mystery. At least in the versions of the song that I’ve heard – or paid attention to – she’s known only by the descriptions others make of her and by her murderous action; unlike Fair Ellender and Lord Thomas (and their parents), she has no voice. She has a house, she has some land, she’s about to have a husband who wants these things and another woman more than he wants her, and she has a knife. But she has no voice.

    What she does with that knife is therefore the only thing that tells us anything about what may be on her mind. Well, that and the fact that she has a knife at all, one that she brings to her wedding. As does her husband. They are both “…standing by / With knife ground keen and sharp.” We don’t even need a third party here to predict murderous disaster.

    Perhaps it’s just what was done at that time, to bring knives ground keen and sharp to your wedding. And perhaps they are carrying knives because…they know Fair Ellender will show up and they will have to…kill each other? Hmmm. As JG comments above, maybe they are just showing up ready to play their fatalistic role, and all three of them are the main stars, acting out their equally problematic desires.

    Except that the Brown girl has no voice. What does she desire?

    Sometimes when I listen to this song I “become” a version of the Brown girl who is not jealous, who is not betrayed, but who just really – and really simply – does not want any part of this at all. I don’t want this man, I don’t want this wedding, and I don’t want this man’s dressed up true love and her entourage acting out at the wedding I don’t want to have anyway. (Where in the song, other than our own interpretation of her murderous act, do we understand this man and this wedding is what the Brown girl really desires?). And – here’s where my drowsy speculation really takes off – I also don’t want to lose my house and land to him if I do marry him, or to lose my property altogether if I don’t, which I might being a single woman in the day. I don’t want to be damned if I do and damned if I don’t, which is exactly what I am. I don’t want any of it, but I have no choice! All I do have is my knife.

    My imagination is aided not only by my own natural inclinations but also by a little modern murder ballad that I love called “Pocket Knife,” by PJ Harvey – an artist no stranger to the murder ballad and its history. She also tends to empathetically adopt the role of the murderer (as we might see in a future post). In her song, which I always hear as the “voice” of the Brown girl, she presents us with a young girl who just really does not want to be married to the man who is going to marry her. And, like Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender, PJ Harvey’s young woman appeals to her mother in an aside, but to no avail – her mother is making the wedding dress. And also like the Brown girl, PJ Harvey’s young woman has a knife.

    And it all goes down from there.

    “Pocket Knife,” by PJ Harvey:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyfmv6kNE3k

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sa9wfBAEfM

    • Forgive the lack of articulation, but wow!

      You’ve opened a door for me here. My masculine assumptions and years of treading the same familiar paths with these songs that I love kept me blind to it. Knowing intellectually that an English gentlewoman’s property was never really her own is not the same as spiritually looking out from the brown girl’s eyes. I am most grateful to you.

      I listened to Pocket Knife and read the lyrics. You’re right. The brown girl lives! (Well, you know what I mean…)

      Wow.

    • I’m with Pat. You’ve done a remarkable bit of unfolding the song here.

      Your parenthetical comment above, “Where in the song, other than our own interpretation of her murderous act, do we understand this man and this wedding is what the Brown girl really desires?”, gets to the heart of the matter for me. In a way, we do the Brown girl a double disservice by supposing her motive to be pure jealousy or otherwise diminishing her agency. Doing so compounds some of the class and gender dimensions we’ve discussed. That is, in a way, unless we do the kind of imaginative work you’re doing, we wind up simply reinforcing the aristocratic themes of the story.

      Some versions of the song have Thomas uttering a dying statement that “this is the end of three true lovers.” Whether he’s a reliable source on this score is open to serious question, but gives us some indication that at least some singers were interested in giving slightly more account of the Brown girl’s motivations.

      I’m going to have to think about this a little bit more, but want to come back to thinking about the core of this song, it’s lesson, if you will, framed from each of the protagonists’ points of view.

      I’d also be interested to know, Shaleane, how your thinking about the Brown girl changes with the MacColl version, where she doesn’t murder anyone.

    • It’s really hard for me to parse the MacColl version, admittedly. But my impression is that in this version the Brown girl *really* recedes as someone whose motivations or desires can ever be known, or are even relevant. (Again, it’s hard for me to parse this version, so I’ve looked at the online version of the lyrics. A lot of them are truncated, but even so it’s not even clear to me there’s a wedding in this version…at least, the wedding becomes completely irrelevant to the song once Fair Annie dies. The Brown girl really has no voice in this version. In the other versions her knife is her only voice.)

      Imagining what *might* have occurred for everyone in this version, it strikes me as an even greater tragedy than the murder-suicide bloodbath of the other versions. It really does. Fair Annie takes on the “Brown girl role” of the previous versions by committing a desperate act (yes I think “dying of grief” = suicide) that releases her, and Lord Thomas and the Brown girl are doomed to an Edith Wharton-esque lifetime of tortured misery together. (The cynic in me also leads me to imagine that Lord Thomas will eventually find another fair girl with which to torture himself and everyone around him…and the Brown girl will always keep her knife on standby.)

      Misery.

  2. Interesting analysis. I am not that familiar with a wide range of folk songs, but I do enjoy murder ballads. I guess we do find our own meanings in songs, and when I first listened to the version in the original post, I didn’t see it so much as a song about betrayal but about fatalism, and that all three figures carry equal share in the tragic ending. Both bride and bridegroom show up to the doomed event with weapons sharp, and Ellender rides off despite her momma’s warnings to set things in motion, knowing full well how things would turn out.

  3. Regarding the point of dying from grief, I agree, this version reminds me of Barbara Allen, and some others.

    There is, no doubt, a belief in the possibility of an emotional death that is common to some of the old ‘love songs’. Their writers knew perhaps, in their own way, that depression is the real deal. (Of course they didn’t have the many sorts of help we provide today for folks. There were no crisis hotlines. Nor did Annie have Twitter and Facebook to drag the callous lord’s name through the mud, though songs could do the trick!)

    I have a hard time knowing if and when that particular device in the ballads is really a euphemism for suicide. Certainly one can’t claim that such is the case in EVERY similar ballad. It’s hard to read that in to Barbara Allen, for example. As well, plenty of these ballads are MORE than graphic when it comes to the violence depicted, self-inflicted or otherwise. Why be coy about suicide in this one then?

    Again, I don’t know. It might not be suicide at all. But it’s reasonable to think that some singers ‘back in the day’ might have had use for less violent imagery, or even for euphemism. The human race is nothing if not variegated. Did a mother sing this version for her child? Was it then passed down until that child’s granddaughter sang it for some ballad collector who wasn’t particularly careful about every word he recorded? Maybe the collector got it all down just exactly perfect. Was there bias in precisely documenting words and tunes, and not asking just WHY s/he sang it the way s/he did? We can’t know, and there’s a deep beauty in that. But it makes all of my speculation suspect of course.

    How many of the people in our own lives just blurt it out in vivid detail, like the Ritchie version does? How many can say it without saying it and still get their point across, as this Scots version does or might? No doubt in songs as old as this one, we see versions written by both sorts, and more.

    Neither has more value of course, and I want to hear them all even though I’ll never really ‘know’ them.

    Anyway, we all need as much good music, and as many good friends, in our lives as we can get.

  4. In the end, deep down and personal and regardless of historical context, for me it’s the choice of wealth over love that’s the key betrayal. We can assign the blame to Thomas’s parents (as often my students do) as it’s their wish he must follow, or to Thomas if we assume that he could or should have ignored his parents. But I first heard it and still hear it as a powerful warning to follow your heart.

    I love to be academic with these ballads, and can and will toss around theories endlessly about what they meant to people who died long ago, all just for fun. But yesterday when I read Jean Ritchie’s reminiscence about listening to Fair Ellender while drifting towards sleep on her porch, and that really she BECAME Ellender in her imagination, something in me started to simmer. The vital thing is that each of us finds his or her own meaning in these ballads first.

    I have a student who is not particularly motivated. She sees little relevance in the history I teach, though she’s a wonderful kid and she likes me. She couldn’t get two paragraphs through Rip Van Winkle yesterday without losing patience and declaring her boredom. But she remembers the ballad Two Sisters and tells me she can’t get it out of her head sometimes, after my playing it only once in class.

    I can relate. Ellender is like that for me. Pierced me the first time I heard it like the brown girl’s knife. These songs are built to last.

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