Eliza Carthy – vocals, octave violin
Tim van Eyken – melodeon, guitar
Track 2 on the album Anglicana (2002)
One morning in the month of June,
Down by a rolling river,
There a jolly sailor chanced to stray,
There he beheld some lover.
Her cheeks were red, her eyes were brown,
Her hair in ringlets hanging down;
Her lovely brow without a frown,
Just as the tide was flowing.
“My pretty maid,” to her he said,
“How come you here so early?
My heart by you it is betrayed
And I might love you dearly.
I am a sailor come from sea,
If you will accept my company
For to walk and view the fishes play,
Just as the tide was flowing.”
No more did stay, but on the way
They both did gang together;
The small birds sing, the lambs did play,
And pleasant was the weather.
They being weary both sat down
Beneath the trees with the branches around;
And what they said will never be known
Just as the tide was flowing.
Upon the grass she then did roll,
Her colour it ran changing.
This pretty maid called out, “Alas!
Don’t let your mind be ranging.”
She gave him twenty pounds in store
Saying, “Meet me when you will, there’s more.
For a jolly sailor I adore
Just as the tide was flowing.”
So they kissed, shook hands and when they part
Jack Tar drank rum and brandy.
And to keep his shipmates in good cheer
The lady’s gold came handy.
Then with some other young girl you’ll go
To the public bar where the brandy flows,
Give me the lad that will do so
Just as the tide was flowing.
A young sailor meets a beautiful maiden by a tidal river. He seems immediately smitten, and says to her, “My heart by you it is betrayed / And I might love you dearly.” He invites her to walk with him, and after a while they lie down to rest in a secluded spot. What was said between them “will never be known,” though it’s not hard to figure out what was done. Afterwards, the maiden gives him £20 and promises him more money if he’ll stop “ranging,” that is, if he’ll commit to her. Then they shake hands and part. But the sailor then spends the money on buying booze for himself and his shipmates, and on any other girls who happen to be available.
Eliza Amy Forbes Carthy (b. Scarborough, North Yorkshire, 1975) is folk royalty, the daughter of Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson. She can play a variety of instruments, but is best known as a singer and fiddler. Her version of this ballad is beholden to that of Harry Cox (1885-1971), the Norfolk farm worker and son of a sailor who had a repertoire of 150 traditional songs which he usually sang unaccompanied. He was discovered in the early 1920s by the classical composer E.J. Moeran, who arranged for him to be recorded by the BBC in 1945. You can hear Cox’s version of “Just as the Tide Was Flowing,” which is almost identical in diction to Eliza Carthy’s, on Track 4 on the album The Voice of the People Vol. 12: We’ve Received Orders to Sail (1998). Eliza Carthy makes small verbal improvements to Cox’s lyrics: e.g., the nonsensical “wrinkles” in the maiden’s hair are corrected to “ringlets”; the possessive pronoun in the line, “And to keep my shipmates in good cheer,” becomes the more distant “his.”
Though Cox’s version is slow and melancholy, you can’t help but feel that as a male, he more than half admires the faithless, womanizing sailor. And that’s the problem with this ballad: where do its sympathies lie? Sam Larner (1878-1965) was a fisherman, like Harry Cox from Norfolk, and he sang a version – it was available as Track 23 on the CD Cruising Round Yarmouth (2014) – that’s more clearly from the sailor’s point of view. Its penultimate line is “Show me the man that won’t do so,” and Larner laughs after the final refrain. It’s all too clear whom he identifies with.
Eliza Carthy’s big change is to channel the maiden’s point of view, but in a distanced, third-person manner intended to mitigate the shame of her betrayal. She transforms the ballad from a male endorsement of Jack-the-Laddishness to one in which a woman mournfully protests male infidelity. “’Twas on an April Morning” (Roud 1546) as sung by Cyril Tawney is the classic expression of Carthy’s theme: “Young men are false and seldom do prove true, / For they’re roving and they’re ranging / And their minds are always changing / For they’re thinking for to find out some pretty girl that’s new.” Or as Balthasar in Much Ado about Nothing succinctly puts it in what is probably Shakespeare’s most famous song, “Men were deceivers ever.” Eliza Carthy’s eight minute epic rendition turns “Just as the Tide Was Flowing” into a world-weary exposition of the unbridgeable gulf between the expectations of the two sexes when it comes to intimacy.
In Carthy’s version, there’s bitter irony in the way that the sailor claims his heart has been “betrayed” by the maiden, for that turns out to be nothing more than a seduction line, and she’s the one who is truly betrayed at the end. Her gift to him of a substantial amount of money intensifies the irony. The sailor has been handsomely rewarded by a beautiful young woman just after having had sex with her. She is obviously of a higher social class, wealthy, probably a virgin – “Her lovely brow without a frown” – and besotted with him. But even her beauty, her sexual availability, her promise of more cash, and their handshake agreement isn’t enough to keep him from “ranging.” Her “Alas!” is a premonition of his faithlessness. And Carthy’s performance is heavy with foreboding, indicating her very strong identification with the maiden.
The refrain, “Just as the tide was flowing,” refers to a flood tide, that is, one incoming to land. As sailing ships arrive in port on a flood tide and leave on an ebb, this hints that the sailor has just landed and will not depart until the tide turns … which it never does in this version of the song. So the sailor does not have the excuse of having to break up with the maiden for professional reasons. The subtitle of Harry Cox’s album notwithstanding, this sailor has not yet Received Orders to Sail. The maiden has yielded up her body to him in a tidal flood of passion but can do nothing to retain the young man’s affection or turn back the onward flow of time.
There are many recordings of this ballad (Roud 1105), starting with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s classical arrangement that’s No. 3 of his song cycle Five English Folk Songs Freely Arranged for Unaccompanied Chorus (1913). Vaughan Williams establishes the lovely tune for the ballad … and ends the narrative happily: “When we were weary we did sit down / Beneath a tree with branches round; / For my true love at last I’d found, / Just as the tide was flowing.” Maybe it’s me, but classical arrangements of traditional folk songs, even when they’re sung by great countertenors or accomplished professional choirs, leave me cold. The songs of the common people just don’t sound at home in King’s College Chapel.
Shirley Collins recorded a two-verse fragmentary version of this ballad on False True Lovers in 1959 – her later one with the Albion Country Band on No Roses (1971) is better known – that she learned from her aunt. But her rendition is a missed opportunity by a fine folk singer. It suggests that time is cyclical – “The tide flows in, the tide flows out, / Twice every day returning” – and so fails to address the irretrievable loss suffered by the maiden. It was Collins’s version that Natalie Merchant, fronting 10,000 Maniacs, covered on the album The Wishing Chair (1985). Steeleye Span do a musically elaborate version of the Harry Cox lyrics on Cogs, Wheels and Lovers (2009), but Maddy Prior shows no sign of Eliza Carthy’s deep identification with the maiden. Cox’s penultimate line, “Give me the lad that will do so,” was an endorsement of the “jolly sailor”’s rakish behaviour. In Carthy’s sombre rendition, it becomes a dark threat, suggesting what she’d do if she laid hands on any lad who treated her like that. Carthy’s extraordinary performance is a profound rendering of the female experience of romantic disillusionment.
There’s a comment under the YouTube recording of this song that runs: “My entire life I have played in bands … I have not just played a vast amount of music but have also listened to countless renditions (live and recorded) of English, Scottish and Irish songs. I personally regard this as one of the greatest versions of a folk song ever recorded, if not the greatest. I certainly cannot think of anything better.” I can certainly endorse that last sentence.
PS. Once upon a time, I never rated Eliza Carthy highly as a performer. I just didn’t like her voice much, and there was nothing on her Definitive Collection (2003), the only CD of hers that I owned, that really caught my fancy. So I never bought Anglicana, which came out shortly after the Definitive compilation, and which created a real stir: it was shortlisted for the 2003 Mercury Prize, and at the 2003 BBC Radio Folk Awards it was voted Best Album of the Year and Eliza Carthy was voted Best Folk Singer of the Year. It wasn’t until I’d got hold of The English Collection: A Definitive Collection of Classic English Folk Music (2004) – time to retire “definitive” as a descriptor of folk compilations, I think – that I first heard her rendition of “Just as the Tide Was Flowing” (Track 5). It was a revelation.
Holmström Ruddick 