95 A. Derry Gaol, or, The Streets of Derry (Bronson)
[Following Bronson, I have created an Appendix page for Child 95 "Maid Freed" which is 95 A. "Derry Gaol," or, "The Streets of Derry." Barry gives this as a secondary ballad (British Ballads from Maine) and Flanders gives several versions of "Derry Gaol/Streets of Derry," her C-G, listed under "Maid Freed." Bronson gives four versions in his Appendix.
Although the ballad was probably created in Ireland between the dates 1817-1830 (Long, 1966), it's likely no versions of the ballad were available to be examined in the late 1800s so Child did not even consider Derry Goal in his headnotes to "Maid Freed." Bronson in the TTCB makes no comment and gives one of Flanders' texts and two of Barry's texts in his Appendix. Phillips Barry (1929) says it's Irish and has something to do with the uprising of 1798. Eleanor Long, published a study, "Derry Gaol" From Formula to Narrative Theme, which is found attached to my Recordings & Info page. Long gives information about the age, dating it between 1817, when Derry Gaol was built, and 1830. She also lists the extant versions and organizes the versions into different types.
R. Matteson 2015]
Excerpt from "Derry Gaol" From Formula to Narrative Theme in International Popular Tradition
By ELEANOR R. LONG (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada)
In 1957, G. Malcolm Laws identified in Anglo-American tradition a ballad which he called "Gallows" and classified as the eleventh item in his category "L: Ballads of Crime and Criminals". Most of the texts at his disposal were fragmentary and mutually contradictory in detail, but the evidence was clear enough to indicate the existence of an independent narrative song in which after taking leave of various relatives the protagonist was rescued from the gallows by a last-minute pardon brought by his sweetheart from (in all but one text) "George, our King."
Subsequent collection of additional variants from Canada, the American Southwest, and Eire, however, raised a number of questions about the precise nature of the ballad thus identified. Some texts furnished a name for the heroine ("Ann O'Neill") and many contained references to "Derry" as the site of the execution: did these allusions provide clues to an historical event immortalized in song by the ballad's composer? Sporadically, a stanza emerged in which the right of confession prior to execution was demanded by a "clergyman": should this be considered part of the ballad's narrative theme? Most annoying, an ever greater number of variants attributed the fortuitous pardon not to "George, our King" but to "the Queen," and several to "the King and Queen": did this represent the natural vagaries of oral transmission, or might there in fact be two substantively
different traditions involved-and if the latter proved to be true, which of them was primary, that recovered in New England or that which seemed to predominate in Eire? In a word, how could the ballad's unique identity and thus the classification appropriate to it be determined?
Because of the extraordinary complexity in this corpus of the textual evidence which must always constitute the fundamental area of inquiry in the study of folk narrative, the discussion which follows is in the nature of a relatively superficial report, using only such examples drawn from the variant texts as are necessary to illustrate conclusions drawn from more exhaustive analysis. That analysis demonstrated that Laws L 11 is extant in at least 27 variants, fragments, and prose summaries, and that those 27 texts can be divided into five groups, four of which clearly derive from independent innovations of the kind I have elsewhere attributed to the function of the integrative folk-singer or "ballad-maker." Therefore, each of the five groups represents one end-product of the traditional process, and each also represents a new departure which itself has become part of the process.
* * * *
The ballad's terminus ad quem is fixed by the occurrence of the line "I have a remit from the King" in a single variant of Child 209 "Geordie" (F-text, collected between 1830 and 1835)[11]. The terminus a quo for the "Derry Gaol" stanza can be fixed by the construction of that building. Although from the time of the Protestant plantation in Ulster in 1608[12] there had been a British prison in the town of Derry, first on the corner of Butcher's Street and then over the Ferrygate, the "Derry Gaol" which later became infamous was completed in 1824, its adjoining court house having been ready for use since 1817[13]. It could, therefore, have played no part in the rebellion of 1798, as some have suggested[14], and indeed there is no record of Derry's having been involved in that insurrection except marginally[15].
Notes from Traditional Ballad Index: Kennedy, following Barry, speculates that this was based on an incident during the 1798 Irish rebellion. The only real supporting evidence is a reference to King George (which, for all it directly proves, could date it to the 1916 rebellion; in any case, Britain had a King named George every year from 1714 to 1839), and in any case the reference to King George in not found in many versions, where it is the Queen who offers the pardon.
Barry et all state unequivocally that the song is Irish. This is likely enough, but there are only a handful of Irish collections (Sam Henry's, and Sarah Makem sang it); the rest are all North American. It's just possible that the song originated in North America and crossed back.
All agree that this was inspired by "The Maid Freed from the Gallows," but the form clearly makes it a separate ballad. Peter Kennedy lists the Sam Henry version of this piece as from 1924, but it was not published until 1937.
[additional upcoming info]