Ballad posting: Child ballad 233
Jan. 24th, 2021 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI think it's the time of year for ballads—I've been listening to and thinking about them a lot over the last few weeks. I think I said a while ago that I wanted to do some more occasional in-depth posts about the ballads, so here is one, on Child ballad 233, 'Andrew Lammie' or 'Mill o' Tifty's Annie', which is one of my favourites.
The plot, basically: Annie, the miller's daughter at Mill o' Tifty near Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, falls in love with Andrew Lammie, a trumpeter in the employ of Lord Fyvie. Her family disapprove because Andrew is a servant and therefore not good enough for Annie; they escalate from taunting to physical abuse, culminating in her murder by her brother. This story is supposedly historical, although I think the authenticity is a bit doubtful (historical ballads often are!). Like many of the ballads it's a tragic story of doomed love, and I like it for the interesting imagery and the things it has to say about the society it's set in, besides the story and the nice tune.
The first recording I heard was the one by Kate Rusby, which I now think is a bit lacking as an interpretation, but I still like it. It's actually one of the more unique recordings, as can be seen on the chart below—Rusby includes several of the vaguer, more poetic verses from Child texts A and B which are often omitted from more straightforward narrative recordings. I especially like the imagery of her opening two verses, and the final two ('...but now that I must walk alone/For I will not see my dearie' is an understatedly lovely way to end). On the other hand she leaves out so many of the 'narrative' verses that a lot of the detail of the plot is lost, to the point that it becomes difficult to follow. The instrumentation is a bit over the top, but I like her take on the tune (all the recordings I've found use the same basic tune, a lovely classic ballad-y one, but there are lots of small differences and variations on it). Of the more traditional ballad-style recordings my favourite is Jean Redpath's—lovely voice, lovely storytelling in both the choice of verses and the performance.
Mainly Norfolk has a nice collection of recordings. I found 20 available between Youtube and Spotify and started by listening to them all and collecting some information about them. The ballad has a lot of verses—Child collected three texts with 27, 25 and 49 verses respectively—so the story can really be told in as much or as little detail as the singer likes. Nearly all the recordings are versions of the same basic text as Child's text C, which is the most thorough and the most coherent of his three texts, but there's a lot of variation in which verses are included and how the story is told. So, of course, I made a spreadsheet to illustrate this:
Each row is a recording; each column is a verse, identified using Child's numbering. Dark green squares indicate a whole verse, light green part of one (typically a singer combines the first couplet from one Child verse and the second from another into a single verse; this often happened to verses A3/B3/C10 and B4/C11, as can be seen here—only Martin Simpson and Jeannie Robertson include both verses in full. It's a shame, because the lines 'Wi apples sweet he did me treat/Which stole my heart so canny' usually get left out—I like them!).
Of the 69 unique verses collected by Child (counting versions of the same verse across different texts together), 43 appear in at least one recording. There's an amount of standard construction: almost all the recordings open with verses C1 and C3, which introduce the main characters; most include a variable number of other verses from the early part of text C setting out the central conflict of the story; the verses from the middle of C are usually skipped; and then we get a variable number of the verses from C33-40, which recount Annie's murder. The most-included verse is A16/C38, in which Annie is killed by her brother, and at least part of which appears in every recording. Kate Rusby's recording on the second row is, as mentioned above, a clear outlier—in fact, it's the only recording to include any verses unique to texts A and/or B. There were three verses not identifiable with anything in Child's texts, one of which (an additional opening verse beginning 'Her hair was fair and her eyes were blue...') appears in three recordings. Twelve of the recordings are titled 'Mill o Tifty's Annie', five 'Andrew Lammie' and one each 'Mill o Tifty', 'Tifty's Annie' and 'Bonnie Annie and Andrew Lammie'. The shortest recording, Richard Carlin's, has 7 verses; the longest, Jeannie Robertson's, has 24.
This was a very interesting experiment! Besides the otherwise-universal absence of my favourite Kate Rusby verses, I was struck by how often verse A12/B10/C9 is left out—only about half the recordings include it—because it's one of my favourites. Here's the text of C9:
As for the plot—the ballads don't tend to be a great place to be a woman, and it's basically about the impossible expectations placed on women in a patriarchal and highly class-structured society, and how they lead a sweet, innocent love story inevitably into tragedy (perhaps those apples had a bit of symbolic weight...!). In fact it seems to be about the impossibility of threading the needle, as it were, between one requirement and another: Andrew is an attractive man and Annie is supposed to recognise that, but she's not supposed to fall in love with him (verses C6-7); Annie isn't actually supposed to want to marry Lord Fyvie because, just as Andrew isn't good enough for her, she's not good enough for a lord, but she's supposed to be flattered by attention from him and not outright reject the hypothetical proposal that he can't actually make (verses C35-36). —In a nice bit of grim farce, this refusal, rather than the Andrew problem directly, appears to be what actually provokes the attack that ends in Annie's murder—many recordings make this more explicit by opening verse C37 with 'At this her father struck her sore...' rather than Child's 'Her father struck her wonderous sore...'.
Child's choice of the title 'Andrew Lammie' is an interesting one—it's not the title favoured by recordings, and Andrew is generally much less of a presence there than in the texts, with most recordings leaving out his exchange with Lord Fyvie in verses C15-19, his conversation with Annie and departure for Edinburgh in C20-28 and his reaction to Annie's death in C47-49. Annie is the main character, after all, and the recordings make the sensible decision to focus on her and her story—but I like the glimpses we get in those verses (and their A and B counterparts, some of which Kate Rusby includes) of Annie and Andrew together, what their relationship is like and what it means to both of them. It heightens the tragedy of the ending.
And how are we supposed to interpret the moral of the story? Child's texts end with various different verses summing up the events and their point. In both B and C, Tifty repents everything and wishes he'd given consent for Annie to marry Andrew (but would he ever have thought that if she were still alive, one wonders?)—but B then has the slightly odd instruction 'You parents grave who children have/In crushing them be canny'—it's fine to destroy your children's lives over loving the wrong person as long as you don't actually murder them? Perhaps it's for the best that recordings almost universally leave these verses out, mostly ending with Annie's death—the very ballad-ish and horribly sad lines 'O mother dear, make me my bed/And lay my face to Fyvie...'—and leaving the listener to make up their own mind.
The plot, basically: Annie, the miller's daughter at Mill o' Tifty near Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, falls in love with Andrew Lammie, a trumpeter in the employ of Lord Fyvie. Her family disapprove because Andrew is a servant and therefore not good enough for Annie; they escalate from taunting to physical abuse, culminating in her murder by her brother. This story is supposedly historical, although I think the authenticity is a bit doubtful (historical ballads often are!). Like many of the ballads it's a tragic story of doomed love, and I like it for the interesting imagery and the things it has to say about the society it's set in, besides the story and the nice tune.
The first recording I heard was the one by Kate Rusby, which I now think is a bit lacking as an interpretation, but I still like it. It's actually one of the more unique recordings, as can be seen on the chart below—Rusby includes several of the vaguer, more poetic verses from Child texts A and B which are often omitted from more straightforward narrative recordings. I especially like the imagery of her opening two verses, and the final two ('...but now that I must walk alone/For I will not see my dearie' is an understatedly lovely way to end). On the other hand she leaves out so many of the 'narrative' verses that a lot of the detail of the plot is lost, to the point that it becomes difficult to follow. The instrumentation is a bit over the top, but I like her take on the tune (all the recordings I've found use the same basic tune, a lovely classic ballad-y one, but there are lots of small differences and variations on it). Of the more traditional ballad-style recordings my favourite is Jean Redpath's—lovely voice, lovely storytelling in both the choice of verses and the performance.
Mainly Norfolk has a nice collection of recordings. I found 20 available between Youtube and Spotify and started by listening to them all and collecting some information about them. The ballad has a lot of verses—Child collected three texts with 27, 25 and 49 verses respectively—so the story can really be told in as much or as little detail as the singer likes. Nearly all the recordings are versions of the same basic text as Child's text C, which is the most thorough and the most coherent of his three texts, but there's a lot of variation in which verses are included and how the story is told. So, of course, I made a spreadsheet to illustrate this:
Each row is a recording; each column is a verse, identified using Child's numbering. Dark green squares indicate a whole verse, light green part of one (typically a singer combines the first couplet from one Child verse and the second from another into a single verse; this often happened to verses A3/B3/C10 and B4/C11, as can be seen here—only Martin Simpson and Jeannie Robertson include both verses in full. It's a shame, because the lines 'Wi apples sweet he did me treat/Which stole my heart so canny' usually get left out—I like them!).
Of the 69 unique verses collected by Child (counting versions of the same verse across different texts together), 43 appear in at least one recording. There's an amount of standard construction: almost all the recordings open with verses C1 and C3, which introduce the main characters; most include a variable number of other verses from the early part of text C setting out the central conflict of the story; the verses from the middle of C are usually skipped; and then we get a variable number of the verses from C33-40, which recount Annie's murder. The most-included verse is A16/C38, in which Annie is killed by her brother, and at least part of which appears in every recording. Kate Rusby's recording on the second row is, as mentioned above, a clear outlier—in fact, it's the only recording to include any verses unique to texts A and/or B. There were three verses not identifiable with anything in Child's texts, one of which (an additional opening verse beginning 'Her hair was fair and her eyes were blue...') appears in three recordings. Twelve of the recordings are titled 'Mill o Tifty's Annie', five 'Andrew Lammie' and one each 'Mill o Tifty', 'Tifty's Annie' and 'Bonnie Annie and Andrew Lammie'. The shortest recording, Richard Carlin's, has 7 verses; the longest, Jeannie Robertson's, has 24.
This was a very interesting experiment! Besides the otherwise-universal absence of my favourite Kate Rusby verses, I was struck by how often verse A12/B10/C9 is left out—only about half the recordings include it—because it's one of my favourites. Here's the text of C9:
‘Love comes in at my bed-side,Which is one of those weird, unsettling images that the ballads are so good at. The slightly odd use of the word 'beyond' (not standard Scots, as far as I can tell—possibly archaic? in any case, most of the singers who do include the verse sing 'beside' instead), and the idea of thwarted love as a sort of haunting (where similar phrasing occurs in other ballads, e.g. Child 74, the thing that 'comes in at my bed-side' is a ghost—this one isn't explicitly a supernatural ballad, but it has slightly haunted edges in a very evocative way).
And love lies down beyond me;
Love has possest my tender breast,
And love will waste my body.
As for the plot—the ballads don't tend to be a great place to be a woman, and it's basically about the impossible expectations placed on women in a patriarchal and highly class-structured society, and how they lead a sweet, innocent love story inevitably into tragedy (perhaps those apples had a bit of symbolic weight...!). In fact it seems to be about the impossibility of threading the needle, as it were, between one requirement and another: Andrew is an attractive man and Annie is supposed to recognise that, but she's not supposed to fall in love with him (verses C6-7); Annie isn't actually supposed to want to marry Lord Fyvie because, just as Andrew isn't good enough for her, she's not good enough for a lord, but she's supposed to be flattered by attention from him and not outright reject the hypothetical proposal that he can't actually make (verses C35-36). —In a nice bit of grim farce, this refusal, rather than the Andrew problem directly, appears to be what actually provokes the attack that ends in Annie's murder—many recordings make this more explicit by opening verse C37 with 'At this her father struck her sore...' rather than Child's 'Her father struck her wonderous sore...'.
Child's choice of the title 'Andrew Lammie' is an interesting one—it's not the title favoured by recordings, and Andrew is generally much less of a presence there than in the texts, with most recordings leaving out his exchange with Lord Fyvie in verses C15-19, his conversation with Annie and departure for Edinburgh in C20-28 and his reaction to Annie's death in C47-49. Annie is the main character, after all, and the recordings make the sensible decision to focus on her and her story—but I like the glimpses we get in those verses (and their A and B counterparts, some of which Kate Rusby includes) of Annie and Andrew together, what their relationship is like and what it means to both of them. It heightens the tragedy of the ending.
And how are we supposed to interpret the moral of the story? Child's texts end with various different verses summing up the events and their point. In both B and C, Tifty repents everything and wishes he'd given consent for Annie to marry Andrew (but would he ever have thought that if she were still alive, one wonders?)—but B then has the slightly odd instruction 'You parents grave who children have/In crushing them be canny'—it's fine to destroy your children's lives over loving the wrong person as long as you don't actually murder them? Perhaps it's for the best that recordings almost universally leave these verses out, mostly ending with Annie's death—the very ballad-ish and horribly sad lines 'O mother dear, make me my bed/And lay my face to Fyvie...'—and leaving the listener to make up their own mind.
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Date: Jan. 24th, 2021 07:00 pm (UTC)I like Dick Gaughan's version a lot. Am listening to Martin Simpson's now, he seems to use a slightly different melody. Can't seem to find Kate Rusby's on youtube, though?
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Date: Jan. 24th, 2021 07:36 pm (UTC)Unfortunately Kate Rusby's recording doesn't seem to be on Youtube—I could only include it because I have the album. I like Martin Simpson's, for the choice of verses and musically—yeah, it's a nice take on the tune.