Kate Rusby – vocals, piano
John McCusker – fiddle
Michael McGoldrick – whistle
Andy Cutting – diatonic accordion
Track 4 on album Sleepless (1999)
“How pleasant is the wind tonight,
I feel some drops of rain.
I never had but one true love,
In greenwood he lies slain.
I’ll do so much for my true love
As any young girl may,
I’ll sit and mourn all on your grave
For twelve months and a day.”
The twelve months and a day being up,
The ghost began to speak:
“Why sit you here and mourn for me?
And you will not let me sleep?
What do you want of me, sweetheart?
Oh, what is it you crave?”
“Just one kiss of your lily-white lips,
And that is all I crave.”
“Oh, don’t you see the fire, sweetheart?
The fire that burns so blue,
Where my poor soul tormented is
All for the love of you.
And if you weren’t my own sweetheart
As I know you well to be,
I’d rend you up in pieces small
As leaves upon a tree.
Mourn not for me, my dearest dear,
Mourn not for me I crave.
I must leave you and all the world
And turn into my grave,
And turn into my grave.”
The speaker introduces herself as a young girl who has lost her one true love to an act of violence, never specified. She believes she’s supposed to mourn him for a year and a day, the standard period for a nineteenth-century widow to wear a black cap and veil. This young girl, however, was not married to her dead lover – or she would have said. And no one would have expected her to haunt – I use the word advisedly – her lover’s graveside for such a long period.
Once this long period is up, the girl continues to mourn, and the dead one awakens. As a ghost or revenant, he asks her what she wants with him, as her weeping won’t let him rest. She tells him that she craves a kiss from his bloodless lips. Upon which, he draws her attention to blue flames* in the graveyard, which, he says, signify his soul in torment for having lost her. (Hellfire is usually sulphurous red.)
Then the ghost of her lover turns on her: if she weren’t once his sweetheart, he’d tear her to pieces! Only his former love for her restrains him. He wants to be left to rest in peace: shut up and leave me alone! (His tone softens in the final verse, suggesting that his outburst was triggered more by frustration at the loss of their love, than by anger.) Nevertheless, his warning to her is abrupt and shocking, and is intended to open an unbridgeable gulf between them as representatives of the dead and the living. His words must surely have the required effect on her, namely to make her move on in life rather than pine away at his graveside in the futile hope of a reunion.
“The Unquiet Grave” is Roud 51, which contains a modest 265 entries. It seems to have been much better known in England than anywhere else. Unusually, the sex of the first and second speakers – the mortal and the revenant – is variable in this ballad, which is except for two lines a dialogue reported in direct speech. So it can be sung by either a male or female representing the first, bereaved speaker. (It could of course be sung as a male/female duet, but almost never is.) The general preference in recording the ballad is to have a female singer by the graveside of her male lover. After all, a man is likelier to have been “slain,” a word which normally suggests something like “killed by a male opponent, in a duel or battle.”
Most commentators seem to agree that the ballad is about the dangers of excessive mourning. Also, some argue that, because it is short and shares some diction with other ballads, it may be a fragment of a longer work, now lost. I disagree with both of these views. It does no good to warn anyone about too much grieving, as grief is a complex emotional state over which you have little control. What this ballad does make plain is that the buried dead rot underground and so their surviving loved ones should make the best of their time on earth. In other words, this piece offers no consolation of a heavenly reunion, which makes it rather modern and realistic in its sentiment. And as for its brevity: I cannot see how anyone would wish this exquisite piece longer than it is.
Child’s collection offers four variants, of which the first, 78A, is the one used as the basis for most modern recordings. The final three verses, in which the ghost of the departed replies to the lover’s request for a kiss, run:
“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips;
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.
‘Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that ere was seen
Is withered to a stalk.
The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away.”
These verses are very fine, as they express a universal message that we might take from the death of a loved one. This is the ending preferred by most modern singers, even if they change “God” to “Death” in the last line. It suggests that a kiss from the dead will be fatal – it certainly would be unsanitary. And it advises the living to move on, as beauty is transitory, life is short, and all flesh is as grass for the Grim Reaper.
However, as shown by David Atkinson in an article in Western Folklore (July 1991), the last three verses of Kate Rusby’s version above comes from a variant collected in Dorset that is rather different from the Child entries. In the Dorset/Rusby variant, the ghost’s threat of extreme violence to the young girl mirrors the unspecified act that led to his own demise. Was she somehow responsible, directly or otherwise, for his death, so that her excessive mourning is a product of guilt? Psychologically speaking, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
Here’s a small sample of the many other recordings of the ballad: A.L. Lloyd (The English and Scottish Popular Ballads Vol. 1, 1956) seems uncomfortable with the strength of emotion in it, his voice breaking in awkward fashion. Joan Baez’s close to a cappella version (Joan/5, 1964) reveals, here and elsewhere, that her voice is too pure for the earthier kind of folk song. Jo Freya (Traditional Songs of England, 1992) sings the male mourner version for no earthly reason, her voice half-drowned by her instrumental backing. Steeleye Span (as “One True Love,” Horkstow Grange, 1998) also provide an overelaborate accompaniment, and the mature Maddy Prior just doesn’t sound like a “young girl.” Siobhan Miller, however, does a more than acceptable version on Strata (2017) that’s accompanied only by a guitar.
Kate Anna Rusby (b. 1973, Penistone, West Yorkshire) was still a young girl when she recorded her first version of “The Unquiet Grave” on Sleepless, her second solo album. Subsequently one of the few stars of the English folk song circuit, Rusby, a.k.a. the Barnsley Nightingale, has long performed and recorded under her own name, never as a mere member of a band. However, in later years she has commanded an increasingly large number of backing instrumentalists, more than forty of whom appear on her anniversary album Twenty (2012).
Rusby’s reprise of “The Unquiet Grave” on Twenty dispenses with the piano for a complex arrangement featuring among others a backing vocalist and a string quartet. But it’s just not as good as her earlier version. The one on Sleepless is a simple arrangement with her own keyboard prominent. She sings the ballad as a dirge, her flat but authentic Yorkshire accent – “ghost” becomes “gorst,” “don’t” becomes “daunt,” – absolutely complementing what is indeed a very mournful piece. I don’t think she has ever better inhabited the spirit of a folk standard, even if her choice of the ballad’s ending is unusual. It’s a heartbreakingly beautiful performance.
*Blue flames have frequently been observed in places where the dead lie, and have traditionally been associated with the restless spirits of the departed. Scientists have been keen to offer a non-supernatural explanation, noting that methane burns blue, but for a long time no one could explain how methane given off by buried corpses could be ignited naturally. But according to New Scientist (19 June 1993), two German scientists have shown that the gas diphosphane is produced by microorganisms acting upon corpses, and the presence of this gas can ignite methane.
PS. I fell in love with the poignant Northernness of Kate Rusby’s voice while watching the quirky English road movie Heartlands (2002) – it’s so low-key and low-budget that the hero Colin’s vehicle is a moped. There’s a scene in a pub when a young folk singer introduces herself as Kate Rusby and performs abbreviated versions of “The Fairest of All Yarrow” and “I Wonder What Is Keeping My True Love This Night,” both from her Sleepless album. The slightly gormless Colin played by Michael Sheen sits enraptured, and so was I. To that point I’d never heard of Kate Rusby, nor did I notice that she’d also done the movie soundtrack. But I resolved there and then to start getting her CDs, which I did on my annual UK trips. And I did manage to see her live, at Cabaret Juste Pour Rire in Montreal in March 2010 as part of the Wintergreen Concert Series. She did not disappoint.
Holmström Ruddick 