Lowlands Low- Hathaway (ME) 1933 Barry BFSN
[My title. From the Bulletin of the Folksong Society of the Northeast (1933). Barry compares this to the 1868 college/minstrel adaptation published by Oliver Ditson (see version 3 in my collection). Dazzled occurs in several versions found in the Flanders collection.
R. Matteson 2014.]
THE GOLDEN VANITY
(Child 286)
[Lowlands Low] Sung by Mrs. Guy R. Hathaway, Mattawamkcag, Maine, as recalled from the singing of her father, Mr. B. F. Shedd. Air transcribed from a phonograph record by P. B.
1. Jacky had an auger that bored two holes at once,
While some were playing cards and some were playing dice,
Jacky let the water in and he dazzled out the lights,
And he sank them in the lowlands, lowlands low,
And he sank them in the lowlands low.
The gaming of the pirates and their being blinded by the inrushing sea-water, traits found already in Child A, "Sir Walter Raleigh sailing in the Lowlands," a broadside of 1682-5, have been sparingly kept in American tradition, as well as the name of Raleigh, found in some Ozark texts, (Vance Randolph: The Ozarks, p. 177). An interesting traditional text printed in The Singer's Journal, II, 686 has the gaming and the blinding, as also Maine C (St. Stephen, New Brunswick), while Maine E (Northeast Harbor) agrees with Mrs. Hathaway's fragment in substituting "lights" for "eyes."
To the same early traditional root belongs a fragment, burlesqued, which forms the first stanza of Lowlands, the Amherst College song, reprinted here from Carmina Collegensia (Ditson, cop. 1868), pp. 171-2.
A boy he had an auger that bored two holes at once,
A boy he had an auger that bored two holes at once,
And some were playing cards and some were throwing dice
The boy upset the tea-kettle and drownded all the mice,
As we sailed along the lowlands, lowlands, lowlands,
As we sailed along the lowlands low.
The melody is a worn down set of Mrs. Hathaway's air. In the refrain, the tonal sequence is very closely similar in both, while the melody to the lines of the ballad in Lowlands is a series of variations of Mrs. Hathaway's third phrase. A portion of this phrase serves as the "cue-motif" of an uninteresting Dorian air, current in the Southern Highlands. We have a set of this air, the first phrase of which is here given.
For comparison, from Mr. O. F. Allan Conner, Harrisburg, Pa.: another set is The Golden Vanity B, in Campbell and Sharp's English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians, p. 143. The extent to which a folk-composer improvises new airs by variation of a short phrase of an older air is a subject worthy of research.
P. B.