Four Marys- Chalmers (OK) c.1920 Moores
[From the Moores' "Ballads and Folk Songs from the South-West," 1964. Their notes follow.
R. Matteson 2015]
35 Mary Hamilton
Histony tells us that Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, had four ladies-in-waiting whose names were Mary. They represented the honorable families of Fleming, Livingston, Seton, and Beaton. In this ballad (Child, No. 173 ) the names "Hamilton" and "Carmichael,, have replaced "Livingston" and "Fleming." Sir Walter Scott was of the opinion that the ballad took rise from an accusation made by John Knox involving a Frenchwoman of the court and the queen's apothecary (see Child, III, 382). In the same context, Professor Child quotes Knox to this effect: "The woman conceived and bore a child, with common consent, the father and mother murdered. Yet were the cries of the newborn bairn heard; search was made and mother and father were apprehended and so both were bound damned to be hanged upon the public streets of Edinburgh." History records an identical story in the Russian court during reign of Czar Peter; a Mary Hamilton was executed in 1719. Child remarks, however, that "there is not a trace of an admixture of the Russian story with that of the French woman and the queen's apothecary, and no ballad about the French woman is known to have existed" (see Child, III,383). Time and the imagination of men substituted Mary Livingston and Lord Henry Darnley, the Queen's husband, for the guilty pair. In 1790, Robert Burns quoted the ballad, which probably "arose between 1719 and 1763," according to Child. For references, see Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, 258-64; Child, III, 379-99; Davis, 421-22; Journal, Vol. XXXVI, 204; Motherwell, II, 184-93; Ord, 457; Owens, 63-65 ; and Randolph, I, 151.
The Four Marys, sung by Mrs. Jimmie Chalmers of Tulsa, who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and came to Oklahoma at the close of World War I.
Yestreen the queen had four Marys;
The nicht she'll hae but three.
There's Mary Seton an' Mary Beaton
An' Mary Carmichael an' me.
Oh, little did my mither think
The day she cradled me
That I would dee so far frae hame
Or be hung on a gallows tree.
Little did my father think
When first he tied my head
What land I was to tread upon
Or where I would win my bread.
Last nicht I washed the queen's feet
And gently laid her down;
And a' the thanks I've gat this nicht
To be hanged in Edinburgh town.
I wish I could lie in my ain kirkyard
Beneath the old yew tree
Where we pu'd the rowans and threaded the gowns,
My sisters and brother and me.
Oh, happy, happy is the maid
That's born of beauty free;
It was my dimpling rosie cheeks
That's been the dune o' me.