Maddy Prior – vocals, tambourine
Tim Hart – dulcimer
Peter Knight – violin
Ashley Hutchings – bass
Martin Carthy – vocals, guitar
Track 7 on the album Please to See the King (1971)
“Lay still, my fond shepherd, and don’t you rise yet,
It’s a fine dewy morning and besides, my love, it is wet.”
“Oh, let it be wet, my love, and ever so cold,
I will rise, my fond Floro, and away to my fold.
Oh no, my bright Floro, it is no such thing;
It’s a bright sun a-shining and the lark is on the wing.”
[Refrain]
Oh, the lark in the morning she rises from her nest,
And she mounts in the air with the dew on her breast,
And like the pretty ploughboy she’ll whistle and sing,
And at night she will return to her own nest again.
When the ploughboy has done all he’s got for to do,
He trips down to the meadows where the grass is all cut down.
[Slightly different refrain]
Oh, the lark in the morning she rises from her nest,
And she climbs to the dawn with the dew on her breast,
And like the pretty ploughboy she’ll whistle and sing,
And at night she will return to her own nest again.
I love traditional ballads for the same reason I love fairy tales. These short narratives, often centuries old, the one in verse, the other in prose, deal unblinkingly with the central questions of our humanity. That’s why they’ve survived so long – they’re about things that have always mattered.
They were composed by design to be remembered and were passed down through the generations orally, as they derive from “the folk,” i.e., non-literate people of low social rank. The ballads are even more memorable than fairy tales, as they have mnemonic elements like rhythm, rhyme, and patterning of diction typical of poetry. And because poetry is dependent upon the specific features of the language it’s written in, ballads aren’t easily translatable, as fairy tales are.
No one knows who “originally” composed the ballads, though significant individuals in the historical past produced “canonical” versions of some of them. But the great ballads cannot be fully stabilized. Like the great fairy tales, they continue to be altered and adapted to the world of those who perform and consume them. No one owns them, not even the Walt Disney Company.
The First Folk Revival of the late 19th and early 20th century is associated with such figures as the American scholar Francis James Child (1825-96), the English folk song collector Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), and the British classical composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). It defined the traditional folk ballad repertory and saw its songs and tunes adapted to the conventions of classical music. I discovered folk ballads during the Second Folk Revival in the UK, when in the late 1960s bands such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span began to use electric instruments to adapt the old songs to rock music conventions.
What follows are short essays on ten of my favourite traditional ballads, focusing on the quality of the narrative but not neglecting the quality of the performance. Most of these ten ballads have been recorded by dozens of artists, but I choose just one of each as definitive, at least in my view.
There won’t be many surprises to folkies among my ten choices. All are traditional standards that have been frequently covered and recorded in recent times. They were all written by Anonymous and passed down by word of mouth, and were undoubtedly changed each time they were performed. And eventually a literate Someone with an Agenda, a poet like Sir Walter Scott, or a scholar like Francis Child, or a composer like Vaughan Williams, wrote them down and “collected” them, thereby temporarily “stabilizing” their lyrics.
I’ll explain why I have chosen a particular performance of the ballad, by comparing it to other performances that I consider not quite, or not nearly, as good. My main criterion for preference is the quality of the narrative in the ballad. The voice of the singer, and the musical accompaniment, if there is one, are important too, of course. But a ballad is a story-poem, so for me the narrative takes centre stage. I’m in no sense a folk purist: sometimes a cappella is best, sometimes amped-up electric guitar. Much depends on the relation between the performer and the song.
I’ll refer in the essays to the Child Ballads, namely the huge collection made by Francis James Child of 305 numbered ballads and their variants, the full name of which is The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98). I’ll also refer to the Roud Folk Song Index, the exhaustive database of references to over 25,000 ballads from all over the English-speaking world compiled by English folklorist Steve Roud (b. 1949). But I’m no folklorist myself. I just love these songs and want to share my enthusiasm with anyone who’s interested.
“Anywhere out of the world!” – Charles Baudelaire
I came to Canada from the UK in 1974, intending to stay for a year. But one thing led to another, and I’m still here. I regret nothing about the move, but I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if I’d never left England.
For us University of London undergraduates in 1971, the legendary past, suitably prettified, had an immense appeal. The girls in our lives wore Laura Ashley dresses, floral and floaty. At college, the girls decorated their study-bedroom walls with posters of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Not the moralistic type like William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, but John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott, which featured a spaced-out babe in Laura Ashley yielding passively to fate in her boat without oars … or John Everett Millais’s Ophelia doing the same thing without a boat.
We boys went in for Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, as our fantasies involved being mesmerized and seduced by underdressed sirens. Under the influence of mild hash-infused cigarettes or bits of blotting paper supposed to contain doses of hallucinogen, we believed we were rejecting the clumsy machismo of our fathers, who’d beaten the Nazis. We long-haired lads painted our fingernails black, played Ziggy Stardust, simulated a non-threatening androgyny that, we hoped, would gain us entry into the floaty babes’ patchouli-scented boudoirs.
At that time I’d begun to collect old illustrated children’s books. Some people, unwilling to assume the responsibilities of adulthood, regress to their own childhood. But my generation reverted to what they imagined their grandparents’ childhood to be, that supposed age of innocence before WWI. Images by Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen were the chief objects of my desire. Had I stayed in the UK, I’d probably have become a weird loner who’d spend all his spare time in Hay-on-Wye, the last stand of the used book trade.
But one element of generation-specific nostalgia has stayed with me in the New World, though it has slowly transformed into something else. The late sixties and early seventies saw a folk revival in the UK, and by folk I don’t mean Bob Dylan or Peter, Paul and Mary. I mean an upsurge in recordings of traditional English and Scottish songs, be they a cappella or in electric arrangements. Steeleye Span’s second LP Please to See the King was released in the same year I started at college. And one song above all on the album enchanted me: “The Lark in the Morning.”
Steeleye’s lead singer Maddy Prior has noted: “This deceptively simple song has been in my repertoire longer than any other folk song. It has that total Arcadian sweep that puts it in the style of tune that Vaughan Williams loved and used in his own writing, and is a delight to sing.” “That total Arcadian sweep” exactly encapsulates what I felt about the song then.
It opens with Tim Hart playing the dulcimer with a piece of wooden dowel! Then the young Maddy Prior, shriller than she later became, starts in with the vocals. Martin Carthy’s supporting vocals and the instrumental backing are a little too loud and forceful on the original recording, so some of the lyrics are quite difficult to get. Here are the first six lines:
“Lay still, my fond shepherd, and don’t you rise yet,
It’s a fine dewy morning and besides, my love, it is wet.”
“Oh, let it be wet, my love, and ever so cold,
I will rise, my fond Floro, and away to my fold.
Oh no, my bright Floro, it is no such thing;
It’s a bright sun a-shining and the lark is on the wing.”
I consulted Mainly Norfolk, that wonderful online resource for folkies, to get a handle on the lyrics. But even then I’ve had to insert or change punctuation to make some kind of sense of these opening lines. It’s a dialogue between “Floro” (shouldn’t that be Flora?) and her lover the “fond shepherd,” in which she implores him to stay in bed with her, while he’s keen to get up and tend his sheep. They disagree about the weather, she claiming it’s wet and he insisting it’s sunny.
But there’s something awry about this whole passage. Floro’s response to the shepherd after his first two lines seems to have gone missing. And Floro says it’s a fine dewy morning, undercutting her own argument,* while the idea that the shepherd finds his flock more appealing than bedding down with Floro supports townies’ prejudices that rural menfolk are a bunch of sheep-shaggers.
None of this struck me at the time. It didn’t even occur to me that the rest of the song is about a “pretty ploughboy” who has no connection with Floro and her reluctant beau aside from his ability to whistle and sing like a lark. I just caught certain words and phrases – “fond shepherd,” “bright sun a-shining, “lark on the wing” – and my soul was lifted. Yes, the song had the power to shift my mood from dark depression to sunlit hope. I felt like the melancholic lover in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29: “Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising, / Haply I think on thee, and then my state, / Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”
Even now I feel that surge of optimism when “The Lark in the Morning” begins. But knowing what I’ve since learnt about the folk tradition, I needed to make sense of the song. And after a little digging this is what I found.
The opening dialogue in the Steeleye Span version of the song is taken from a lyric called “Lay Still” featuring Floro and a shepherd. It was collected by the great classical composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1904. At some earlier point this dialogue seems itself to have been borrowed from an anonymous pastoral poem, “Strephon and Chloris: or, The Coy Shepherd and Kind Shepherdess” (1658-88). That one opens, “Lye still my dear Shepherd, and do not rise yet, / For ’tis a cold windy Morning, and b[esid]es it is wet. / My Cloris make haste, for it is no such thing, / Our time we do waste, for the Lark is on Wing.” So “Floro” is probably a corruption of “Chloris,” a typical name for a pastoral nymph. The lovely melody, adapted by Steeleye Span, was developed by Vaughan Williams in his cantata, Folk Songs of the Four Seasons (1949).** “The Lark in the Morning” is one of the songs representing spring in the cantata.
“The Lark in the Morning” has also come down to us as a folk ballad much longer and quite different from the Vaughan Williams / Steeleye Span version. An instrumentally unaccompanied rendition by Tony Rose, Track 4 on his album Under the Greenwood Tree (1971), makes it quite clear where the ploughboy comes in – he’s the central figure of the ballad! After the ploughboy has performed his task of cutting down the meadows, he and a damsel “consort” together:
If they by chance should tumble all on the new-mown hay,
Oh, it’s “Kiss me now or never,” this pretty maid would say.
And it’s twenty long weeks being over and being past,
Her mother did ask her the reason why she thickened around the waist.
“Oh, it was the pretty ploughboy,” the damsel she did say,
“Who caused me for to tumble all along the new-mown hay.”
“The Lark in the Morning” that Tony Rose sings is a traditional ballad (Roud 151), next to which the Vaughan Williams / Steeleye Span version seems bowdlerized, cobbled together, and truncated. But the voice of Maddy Prior in her early twenties takes me back to a time when I was hardly older than the pretty ploughboy, and badly needed that lift in the spirits that the song gave me.
“The Lark in the Morning” was my entrée into British folk song and to this day it remains an emotional touchstone. That it’s an incoherent fragment of sanitized pastoral in which two unrelated works have been inappropriately jammed together will never shake my abiding love of the Steeleye Span version of the song. Nevertheless, Steeleye’s “Lark” isn’t one of my ten favourite traditional ballads … because it’s not a ballad! As the focus has been shifted from the ploughboy to the lark and almost everything else has been omitted, what was once a ballad has been pared down into a lyric.
I now love traditional folk songs for a very different reason than I did in 1971. Then they were a vehicle of escape from the chill winds of adult reality. Anywhere out of the world! Now they are just the opposite: they are bracing doses of the real world as the unprivileged folk apprehended it, rendered in a narrative form that makes these songs intensely memorable. I hope you enjoy them.
*Steeleye must have subsequently realized this made no sense and changed “fine” to “cold” in live performance, such as the one recorded here.
**Much better known is Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, a short romance for violin and orchestra evoking a pastoral idyll. It was probably composed just before WWI and is now one of the composer’s most popular works. While it’s playing, read the YouTube comments: they’re a testament to the power of music.
PS. I saw Steeleye Span live a couple of times in the early 1970s, including at the Cambridge Folk Festival in July 1973. To my chagrin, they didn’t play “The Lark in the Morning” on either occasion. That’s possibly because Martin Carthy had left and they were keen to push the material on their new album Parcel of Rogues. The star attraction at Cambridge was the unexpected appearance of Jim Croce, the folkish singer-songwriter who was just making it big. Croce would be killed in a plane crash a few weeks later, so “Time in a Bottle” hit #1 in the US charts posthumously.
Holmström Ruddick 