Martin Carthy – vocals, guitar
Dave Swarbrick – fiddle*
Originally recorded as Track 3 on the album Martin Carthy (1965); Track 1 on the album Life and Limb (1990)
Sovay, Sovay all on a day,
She dressed herself in man’s array
With a sword and a pistol all by her side,
To meet her true love, to meet her true love, away did ride.
As she was riding over the plain,
She met her true love and bid him stand:
“Your gold and silver, kind Sir,” she said,
“Or else this moment, or else this moment, your life I’ll have.”
And when she’d robbed him of his store,
She says, “Kind Sir, there is one thing more:
A golden ring which I know you have,
Deliver it, deliver it, your sweet life to save.”
“Oh that golden ring a token is;
My life I’ll lose, the ring I’ll save.”
Being tender-hearted just like a dove,
She rode away, she rode away from her true love.
Next morning in the garden green,
Just like true lovers they were seen.
He spied his watch hanging by her clothes;
It made him blush, made him blush, like any rose.
“Oh what makes you blush at so silly a thing,
I thought to have had your golden ring;
It was I that robbed you all on the plain,
So here’s your watch, here’s your watch and your gold again.
“I did intend and it was to know
If that you were my true love or no.
For if you’d have give me that ring,“ she said,
“I’d have pulled the trigger, I’d have pulled the trigger, and shot you dead.”**
“Sovay” is also known as “The Female Highwayman” (Roud 7) or by the name of its protagonist, which itself varies: Cecilia, Sylvia, Sophie, Sally, etc. The Martin Carthy version is an object lesson in narrative economy, with an irresistible hook and a powerful denouement. We are immediately intrigued to know why a woman should dress in man’s clothes and, armed to the teeth, ride off to meet her lover. The immediate explanation is not spelled out, but is implicit in the phrase, “bid him stand,” in the second verse. Her form of address to him, “kind Sir,” makes a nice contrast with her deadly threat in the next line, and emphasizes she means business. Has she pulled off this stunt before? It’s an interesting question, never resolved.
When she demands the ring on pain of death and he refuses, the narrative seems poised to go in one of two directions. If what she’s doing is about robbery pure and simple, she could blow him away and take the ring. Or he could recognize her as the only other person who knows about the ring, blowing her disguise. But she simply rides off, concealing behind her mask her feminine delight at the success of her plan – now becoming clear to attentive members of the audience. Her lover didn’t recognize her and is freaked out that this ruthless robber knows about his most intimate possession.
Cut to next morning. He finds his watch hanging by her clothes and, in another counter-gender-stereotypical moment, he blushes “like any rose” with embarrassment as he realises who robbed him. She spells out the reason for her stratagem to him, but this is no narrative weakness because what she has finally to say is still both surprising and shocking: “Yes, it was I who robbed you, and if you had given me back the ring that I gave you, you’d have shown me that your love for me was disposable, and I’d have shot you dead.” And we believe that she would have done exactly that. This was her test of her “true love,” and he passed. But in future her lover will always think twice before cheating on this lady. And again we may wonder, has she played this game before, perhaps with a different outcome?
Martin Carthy noted on his first album: “’Sovay Sovay’ was a great favourite among country singers … The tune sung here was collected by Hammond in Dorset and slightly altered rhythmically by Bert Lloyd giving it a somewhat Balkan lift. The text is collated from various versions.”
“Sovay” is “Sophie” or “Sylvie” defeminized, you might say, and thus disguised. The anomalous role of a female highwayman is an appealing fantasy to legions of women who’d love to have dared to threaten the men in their lives with fatal consequences if caught messing around. Of course quite a few women entertain the fantasy of being pistol-packing bad girls, period. And there’s a male fantasy in here too: the not inconsiderable number of men who ache to be dominated, at least in play, by their women.
The great age of highwayman was 1660-1714, and its most notorious figure was Dick Turpin (1705-39). After frequently evading the law with the aid of disguise, he was eventually caught in Yorkshire and hanged as a horse thief. But were there really highwaywomen back in the day? The legend of “wicked” Katherine Ferrers (1634-60) of Hertfordshire suggests there might have been. Ferrers was a distressed gentlewoman during the English Civil War who is supposed to have taken to highway robbery to support her family. There is no actual evidence that she did such a thing, however, though many legends have become attached to her name. The genteel “kind Sir” business in the ballad derives from the fact that Sovay is a lady of high degree – how otherwise could she have afforded a gold ring? – and she is acting in the tradition, not of baseborn Turpin, but of the impoverished Royalist gentlemen who took to highway robbery during the Civil War and its Cromwellian aftermath.
“Sovay” ought to be a woman’s song, as Sovay’s voice and point of view predominate in this ballad, her lover having only two lines. But prominent versions by female singers aren’t especially noteworthy. Unaccompanied Anne Briggs, who recognized the ballad as “strong stuff,” for once can’t seem to get the tune quite right. Jacqui McShee has to share vocals with Bert Jansch and battle Pentangle’s unsympathetically elaborate jazzy backing. More recently, Rachael McShane gives an almost apologetic version of “Sylvie,” implying to me that she hasn’t the necessary understanding of, or sympathy for, the protagonist: “She sounds like the ultimate bridezilla to me, he’d be better off out of it.”
Martin Carthy (b. 1941) is the central figure in the Second Folk Revival in the UK. To my mind, his is the definitive version of “Sovay,” and it’s an example of his very best work in both adaptation and performance. He sings the ballad at a galloping pace, with no pause between verses, yet he manages to convey the narrative switches in and out of direct speech. Carthy’s guitar and vocals are, as ever, enhanced by the simply perfect fiddling of Dave Swarbrick (1941-2016).
In their version, each verse has three nine-syllable lines concluded by a hexameter with a doubled first half. Carthy, master of folk phrasing, gets away with pronouncing “lovers” as “lov-i-ers” in the fifth verse to maintain the rhythm. This regular metrical pattern gives an admirable formal shape to the ballad that already has such a neat narrative structure. And finally: Carthy and Swarbrick allow a half second of silence following the last words of the song – “and shot you dead” – to brilliantly dramatic effect before launching into their instrumental coda.
*Q. What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin? A. The music they’re playing.
**The last two lines differ in Carthy’s first recording of “Sovay,” and aren’t nearly as good: “So now I have a contented mind, / My heart and all my heart and all ‘tis thine.”
PS. I lived for too many years in Regina, Saskatchewan, at the heart of the Canadian prairies. It’s flyover country, with little to see but treeless plains stretching to the horizon. Saskatchewan license plates have the caption, “Land of Living Skies,” indicating that the cloud formations overhead are more interesting than anything on the ground. Hence my incredulity when I heard, some time around 1990, that Martin Carthy was giving a concert in Regina. It was at the Copper Kettle, a small downtown restaurant owned by Greeks that specialized in takeout pizza. I arrived to find this unlikely venue packed to the rafters with perhaps sixty people seated at the tables. The living legend Martin Carthy came and performed solo, with just his guitar, unamplified. I don’t think the Copper Kettle even had a stage for him to stand on.
How to explain this? Well, Carthy has always believed in fostering the intimate contact of folk performer and audience, so he enjoys working small venues. Check out this BBC documentary, evidently made on the cheap as it has no voice-over commentary, triggered by his attendance at Buck House in 2002 to get a gong for his services to traditional music. The doc gets across very well the extraordinarily sympathetic personal qualities of this great performer, including his close musical relationship with his wife Norma Waterson and their daughter Eliza (qq.v).
Holmström Ruddick 