WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Timbrel and Lyre: Moral Ballads Pt. 1

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

This episode dives into the ballads rural Appalachia inherited from Old England, focusing on their cultural uses and significance—moral, educational, communicative, and romantic.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Gwen Thompson, and you're listening to The Timberl and the Liar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Last episode, we talked about sacred harp singing, which is the colonial-era method of Christian music instruction that mingled popular ballads with sacred poetry and lives on as folk art in the South. Since then, I've realized that I made a grave error in the syllabus. Fully appreciating Sacred harp and its sound requires a certain level of familiarity with the popular ballads and tunes that created it. And there is a rich history of ballad in American folk music. These stories are funny, sad, sweet, spiteful, or thrilling,

according to your taste. And today, we're going to dive into them. Almost all the ballad singers you'll hear on this episode will come from rural Appalachia, and that's not an accident or me playing favorites with different regions. Ballads are ubiquitous. You can find them all over the U.S. wherever there are singers. They're an easy way to remember and tell them in turn, so you'll also find them wherever there are storytellers. But preserving folk songs in the United States was not considered a worthwhile academic pursuit until the early 20th century, and ballads only last as long as people want to hear them. They're preserved by oral tradition or by academics, and they're a popular form of entertainment

and memory among people who can't read, or who can sing stories while they work. This keeps the ballad form strong when you need it, but unfortunately it means that when you achieve mass literacy, you tend to lose ballads. So, by the time people like the Lomax's or Cecil Sharp started collecting ballads, there was very little left of anything specific to, say, the Revolutionary War. The highly educated Northeast had mostly moved on to popular music or the songs coming off Broadway, which, as a side note, if you think it's cool and trendy to listen to Hamilton or Bright Star, I'm here to tell you that you're not as innovative as you think. People have been getting their favorite popular music from the stage pretty much since they

legitimized the stage. Anyway, meanwhile, the Deep South had a strong African-American influence that had changed its ballads into almost another genre, and while you certainly found ballads in the Midwest and the West, they didn't have the same staying power as their ones were going to study today. They tended to be written spontaneously about local events, spread no further than the towns they were written in, and die out quickly. Of course, with some exceptions, and hopefully in a distant episode, we'll talk about those two. The songs that we're studying today are what I call moral ballads. They came over from England with the first American colonists. They adapted a bit to their new environment, and they've been floating around in the Southern Appalachians ever since.

It's enough to give you chills to hear Gene Ritchie sing a light ballad in a 1957 recording, and then find an identical song in a book of ballads written 200 years earlier and across the Atlantic Ocean. I've been going on with the preface for too long now, though, so let's get started. Louis Lemore, the famous author of Westerns, wrote in his memoir of telling such stories, as these when he was an itinerant worker in the Dust Bowl days. During those years, he said, I often recited poetry, in bunk houses, in mining or lumber camps, and in chips foxalls. It was usually the verse of Robert W. Service or Ruddyard Kipling, but there was a lot of poetry floating around, written for, and often by the kind of men we were, occasionally printed, but usually

passed from memory to memory. Moral ballads serve that purpose. They are the culture of an illiterate people. Never make the mistake of assuming that you need literacy to have a high culture. They are the Aesop's fables and moral mythology of a whole breed of hardworking people in the Appalachian Mountains. Let's listen to one textbook example, where the questioner asks Edward over and over why his clothes are bloody. How came that blood on your shirts leave? He keeps making excuses. It's the farmhorses blood or the hunting dogs, but the questioner is not convinced, and Edward finally confesses. Oh, it is the blood of my brother-in-law that went away with me, me, me, that went away with... Edward has killed his brother-in-law.

Why isn't important we don't find out? Rural Appalachia was and remains heavily isolated. Child marriage was widespread. Even Dolly Parton has said she knows girls who are married as young as 12, and that's because parents had more kids than they could feed and had to get them out of the house quickly. Rule of law was as fair as the local authority wanted to make it because no one outside the hauler saw what you did. So provocation isn't the issue. You may not have a chance to make a legal plea before a jury. So stay away from violence. And it's what will you do now, my love,

on yonder ship, and I'll sail across the sea, sea, sea, sail across the sea, sail across the sea. And if you do do something wicked, the only thing you can do about it is get away. What you do here is invisible, which is why if blood feuds were common in any part of the country, it was Appalachia. You get away to save your life, and you'll never be able to safely come back. In some versions of the ballad that I've found, the questioner is more obviously Edward's mother. In this case, it's only implied. But moral questioning songs like this are pretty common.

For example, there's Lord Randall, another one. Oh, it's where have you been, Lord Randall, my son? Where have you been, my handsome young one? I've been a hutting and a rambling, mother make my bed soon. I'm a tuckard and a wearied and a fame would lie down. Lord Randall has actually been secretly meeting his lover in the woods, where she poisoned him, as his mother finally finds out, after verse, after verse of roundabout questioning.

Oh, I fear that ye are pisoned Lord Wrandle, my son. I fear that ye are pisoned my bonie young man. Oh, I, I am pisoned mither mak my bit soon. For I'm sick at the heart and a fain, what'll I do? And it's significant that the mother is almost always the questioner in this style of ballad because it's the questioner who takes the confession. And it's the mother, the questioner, who teaches you your moral education through these songs. You would grow up maybe working in a mine shaft with your father,

or maybe farming in your own corner of the field. But you would always hear your mother singing while she cooked, washed dishes, and darned socks. And it would be your mother, the questioner, who takes your confession, and who grieved for you if you killed someone and had to go away forever. Here's another ballad meant specifically for young girls. It's called Omi Wise, and it tells the dangers of running away with a man before you married him. I could just as easily have used Pretty Polly or the Lexington murder or a dozen other ballads with essentially the same story.

By John Lewis's life He promised her some money Some of their fine thing Or to meet her lover secretly Fool-like, as some ballad versions say outright In one version he asks her To come along and go with me Before we get married some pleasure to see

Laying the Moral on Thick The ballad singer is making it obvious what this wicked lover wants. Well, Omi's in love, so she falls for it, and they ride all the way to the river together before she realizes what his plan is. John Louisie, John Lewisie, won't you tell me your mind? My mind is to drown you and leave you behind. Make pity on. as the loamack's

wrote there are literally scores of local ballads that tell the story of the young man who murders his sweetheart instead of marrying her when she gets in a family way the song is a warning to young girls no matter what he promises you no matter how wonderful he seems be careful don't give him anything you shouldn't and be safe but what if a girl does get into a bad situation What if she realizes halfway down the road that she's going the wrong way? Well, the ballads have advice for that, too. False Sir John starts off just like Omi Wise. False Sir John meets a pretty girl, Mae Colvin.

Courts her, flatters her, and finally persuades her to ride off with him. Oh, he'll marry her eventually. It's bringing me some of your father's gold and some of your mother's fee. I'll take thee to some far off land, and there I'll marry thee. and there I'll marry thee. Oh, and of course, before they go, she needs to rob her father's coffers for money to pay for the wedding

and his stables for horses to ride on because how else are they going to get there, obviously. There's even a level of humor and how blithely May Calvin falls for his scheme. She's gone into her father's coffer where all of his money's lay. She's tucked the yellow and left the white and lightly skipped away.

And lightly skipped away. But once they're mounted in writing, False Sir John leads her not on a destination wedding, but to the edge of a cliff, where he tells her she will drown. After, of course, she takes off her very expensive clothes. Light down, light down, said Falseer John, your bridal bed you see. It's seven women have a drowned here,

and the eighth one you shall be, and the eighth one you shall be. But May Colvin is clever She doesn't wallow in a broken heart Lament her betrayal Or offer to be his slave forever If he'll only let her live As some of the more dramatic heroines do

Instead, she makes a plan Turn around, turn around Oh, false sir John And look at the leaves of the tree For I don't become a gentleman A naked woman to see A naked woman to see Oh false sir John has turned around

To gaze at the leaves on the tree She's made a dash for their tender little arms And pushed him into the sea And pushed him into the sea Her tender little arms She's not strong And the singer in the audience both know she isn't Girls have to find a way to protect themselves

Even as the physically weaker sex And that means keeping a strong head on their shoulders Her lover pleads with her to rescue him but she shows some strong common sense in refusing. She rides home much the wiser, not forgetting to cover her tracks. Then up and spoke that little parrot, said May Colvin, where have you been?

And what have you done with false sir John that went with you riding? That went with you ride in. Oh, hold your tongue, my pretty parrot, and tell no tails on me. And I'll buy you a cage, beaten gold with spokes of ivory, with spokes of ivory. Now, of course, there's a level of humor throughout the song.

It's a little bit more satirical and less brooding than Omi-Wise, from the simplicity of the ruse that False Sir John falls for to the bribing of the parrot. But some of the best fairy tales are funny, and humor doesn't need to sacrifice the moral. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. False Sir John has been sung since the mid-1700s on both sides of the Atlantic, cautioning young girls to be wise. Even concealing the fact from her parents, while not what most parents would consider healthy behavior today, probably has roots in some wisdom. In a small community where secrets don't stay secrets, and your ability to marry well and thus provide for

yourself depends on your reputation. Well, really, you should avoid making mistakes, but if you're going to make any, fix them quickly and then cover your tracks. Now, at this point, you might be eagerly listening to what I'm saying and absorbing it, but you might also be skeptical. Maybe you think that learning your morals from songs is highly unusual and that people don't pay enough attention to song lyrics anyway to learn that way. Well, the people of the mountains would tell you themselves that that's not true. They admitted to the song collectors who came knocking that they used to sing certain songs despite husbands, wives, or mothers. In effect, they admitted that these songs were active and deliberate forms of communication. For example,

the farmer's cursed wife is a comic song about a farmer who gets a visit from the devil. The devil threatens to take away the farmer's wife, but the farmer weirdly tells him he's welcome to her. The devil drags her down to hell, but she's even meaner down there, and torments all the little devil children until they up and beg the devil to send her back, which he does to the poor farmer's consternation. Aunt Molly Jackson, a prolific songstress who taught. Aunt Molly Jackson, a prolific songstress who taught the song to the Lomaxes, told them that Appalachian wives were very superstitious, and husbands would sing it to them to frighten them into submission if they'd had a fight.

Oh, a lot of times that was sung by the farmers to scare their wives, you know, when they'd get to quarrel and raise them sand around, you know, to scare them up and say, you know, the same thing might happen to them. You know, them old religious women, They're awful afraid of the devil. Do they actually believe that this thing was true? Oh, yes. Oh, certainly, yes. There's plenty of them believe that the devil actually come and call on the old man one morning

when he started out to plow to have sacked up the old lady and took her right away. But before it makes you feel too bad for the women, let me assure you that they got their own back. One woman from Kentucky said of this song that a lot of times a woman would be singing that, and the men would say, Oh, sing something else, for there's no truth in that song. Songs that women makes up about the men, about their husbands and about their sweethearts.

The men think that we've given them the wrong kind of a deal, and it's not justice, and they have protested, and everly have, as far back as I can remember. Women had their own ways to infuriate their husbands right back. And here's another, one that Aunt Molly Jackson again, explained thus. He was an old rich man that had plenty of money and plenty of gold and silver,

and this girl's mother wanted her to be nice to him and try to care for him because he was a wealthy man. And the girl he simply didn't appeal to her, and naturally she didn't want him at any cost. In the mountains, you'd sing this song any time that the mother began to talk to the daughters about marrying some old man when probably maybe they already kindly felt like they was in love or fancying some young man in the neighboring county. Then they sang it as kind of a protest song. Well, we're starting to run out of time, so I'm just going to show you. show you one more ballad. This is a courting song called Jackaro. It's one of the few mountain ballads with a happy ending. Most of them end like the most famous of their sisters, Barbara

Allen, with two dead lovers. But Jackero is a happy love song, even if it is a bit of a soap opera. Ballad collectors in the early 1900s would tell you that it was useless to go into the mountains and ask for secular songs or old ballads. You had to ask for old-timey love songs if you wanted anyone to know what you meant. This was a love song indeed. In it, two, two. star-crossed lovers are separated by the girl's parents. Her parents saw him coming, they flew in an angry way. She gave him 40 shillings to bear him far away. Oh, to bear him far away. He sailed all over the ocean, all over the deep blue sea. ended in the wars of germany she went down to the story has a happy ending the girl successfully

finds her lover on the battlefield and probably carries him off to town to a physician and marries him they live happily ever after and now they're happily married so well why not you and this is one of the courting ballads it was absolutely normal for a young man to come courting with his violin his banjo or just his raw voice and to sing to his lady love many suitors preferred sad songs, hence the high melodrama of jaccaro. The idea was to soften them up, get them feeling tender and sentimental, so they were more likely to feel bad for you and fall back in love. One mountain woman told the low maxes of a different but similar song.

It's a mighty sorrowful sounding song, but I like it. It's one my sweetheart used to sing when he came over the mountains of court in me. He made it sound as mournful as he could so's to make me pity him. Did you pity him? they asked. Well, I reckon so I've been married to him 30 years. We're out of time on these grand old songs, but you can come back in two weeks for another episode to finish them off. We're going to stick with this genre,

but this time we'll explore how the songs evolved during their trip across the Atlantic Ocean and look closer at the ties to England. Thanks for listening.