My Son David- Robertson (Aberdeenshire) c.1918
From: Two Versions of "Edward"
Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Dec., 1955), pp. 252-253 (By courtesy of the School of Scottish Studies)
[Listen: Jeannie Robertson- My Son David
What is not given here is information about where Roberstson learned the song. She learned the ballad from her mother when her brother and father were off fighting in World War I (1914-1918). I've put a date of c. 1918 which is approximate. Robertson would have been 10 years old at that time.
The title given in the article was "Son David." At the bottom of the page is a brief biography, an account of Hamlish Henderson meeting Jeannie Robertson and an article by Vic Smith.]
MY SON DAVID [SON DAVID]
Sung by Jeannie Robertson (Mrs. Jean Higgins), Aberdeenshire; Recorded by Hamish Henderson; Transcribed by Francis Collinson.
1. Oh what's the blood that's on your sword?
My son David, Ho son David,
What's the blood 'at's on your sword?
come promise tell me true.
2. Oh that's the blood of my grey meir;
Hey lady mother, Ho lady mother,
That's the blood of my grey meir
Because it wouldna rule by me.
3. O that blood it is ower clear;
My son David, etc.
That blood it is ower clear,
Come promise tell me true.
4. O that's the blood of my grey hound
Hey lady mother, etc.
That's the blood of my grey hound
Because it wouldna rule by me.
5. O that blood it is ower clear;
My son David, etc.
That blood it is ower clear,
Come promise tell me true.
6. O that's the blood of my brother John,
Hey lady mother, etc.
That's the blood of my brother John
Because he wouldna rule by me.
7. O when will you come back again,
My son David, etc.
When will you come back again
Come promise tell me true.
8. When the sun and moon meets in yon glen,
Hey lady mother, etc.
When the sun and moon meets in yon glen,
Will I return again.
[Note: Mrs. Higgins first began to recall her version when recording for Peter Kennedy in London, November, 1953 (B.B.C., R.P.L. 21089). A 10-inch record of this version will be published by the Society in 1956] [According to one source- Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music- Jeannie Robertson sang My Son David in a recording collected by Alan Lomax in 1951 on the Tradition Records LP]
__________________
Brief biography: Jeannie Robertson (b. 1908 d. 1975)
“A native of Aberdeen, Jeannie belongs to the 'travelling clans’ of the North-East of Scotland. She learned most of her songs from her mother, who kept a wee shop in the Gallowgate. It was of Jeannie that the American folklorist Marguirite Olney wrote: “Here is the finest ballad singing I’ve ever heard. It’s as near as you can get to the high ballad style. There’s nothing like it in the States-no trained singer could possible imitate it. It has to be inherited”. Other tributes include: “One of the finest ballad-singers in Western Europe”, (from A. L. Lloyd) and “A monumental figure of the world’s folksong” (from Alan Lomax). Hamish Henderson 1958
__________________
[This is an account of Hamlish Henderson meeting Jeannie Robertson]
From: Context and Loss in Scottish Ballad Tradition
by John D. Niles and Eleanor R. Long
Western Folklore, Vol. 45, No. 2, The Ballad in Context: Paradigms of Meaning (Apr.,1986), pp. 83-109
Hamish Henderson has recently retold the good story of how one afternoon in the summer of 1953, he first came to the front door of the small cold-water flat at 21 Causewayend, Aberdeen. He was looking for a woman named Jeannie Higgins, or (to go by her maiden name and the name by which she is now remembered) Jeannie Robertson. The trail that led to Robertson had begun the preceding summer in the town of Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, where Henderson was staying while on one of his early collecting expeditions. As Jeannie Robertson's own version of the incident has been published,[1] there may be some interest in hearing Henderson's complementary account of what led to his discovery of one of the world's great folksingers, especially since the discovery led to an eventual recognition of the part her people, the Scottish Travellers, play in English-language culture as conveyors of a wealth of oral lore.[2]
HH The discovery of Jeannie in the summer of '53 was the culmination of all my hopes. I felt in my bones that in the Northeast, which had given so much balladry to Scotland and the world in the past, there must be somebody there who not only was a great tradition-bearer but probably a great personality as well. I felt this without having any concrete. ... I mean I'd recorded a number of good singers right enough with [Alan] Lomax, but nobody on the scale of Jeannie. So I was lucky that I eventually got hold of her.
JN How did you do it?
HH It was the fruit of a whole-you know-chains of things coming together, more or less. The immediate chain of development was from 1952 from the recording tour that I did in the region of Echt and Ythanside [Aberdeenshire]. On one occasion I was having lunch in the clubhouse [the community center, with cheap rooms for rent] in Fyvie, when a lad came and had lunch there too. He was a travelling man, a rich travelling man. So I invited him to come and sit beside me when he came into the room. And I loved having a crack [a talk] during a meal, you know? So we were exchanging information. He would ask me what I was doing, and vice versa, and he was quite interested when I said I'd been recording singers and songs. So he said, "Did you ever record in Aberdeen itself?" I said, "Yes, I did, but not very much." "Well," he said, "there's unknown talent lurking there in Aberdeen. You should go to the Castlegate on a market day and," he says, "the folk there in the Castlegate will give you all the information you need."
That was in the autumn of 1952, and I couldn't follow it up immediately because I had so much to do with various people in the area of Fyvie, [and] also because my money was running out. But the following year I made that a priority. It always lodged in my head. "First thing I do when I get to Aberdeen will be to go to the Castlegate." So I did just that. And there in the Castlegate on a market day were all these various stalls, you know-mostly travelling people. Travelling people in the technical sense-they were tinkers, you know?
JN Yes.
HH Anyway, I went from place to place, and when they weren't too occupied I would talk about songs and all that. Eventually I began to get a list of people in a notebook in which I began to make little ticks or crosses beside each new mention of a singer. So it was Jeannie Higgins: I began to get one, two, three, four. ... I was talking about this with-oh, Geordie Hutchinson or whoever. "Oh, you ought to go and hear Jeannie Higgins!" So I began to think, "Well, Jeannie Higgins-let's give it a try!" So at that time I was living in a house in Maberly Street and by great good fortune it wasn't all that far from the address that I got for Jeannie Higgins, which was Causewayend. So after having my evening meal I thought, "Well, to hell with it, I'll see about this Jeannie Higgins." So off I went from Maberly Street to Causewayend and the wee house of Jeannie's, no longer there. And I rang the bell, or knocked on the door, can't remember which, and there was Jeannie standing there.
And she'd been cleaning in the house and had this sort of turban thing and an apron. Quite clearly she wasn't too keen on being disturbed. Her attitude was more or less "Go away, we've got one, come back next month!" [Laughter] So I was arguing sort of frantically against time; I didn't want the door to be shut on me. And I began to sing a verse of The Battle of Harlaw that I'd recorded a day or two before. And this amused Jeannie, and a slow smile spread over her face. Right away she invited me in and told me that she would sing me the right way of it. So then she put me down in a chair inside this wee room, in her house on Causewayend, fixed me with her big black eyes, and began singing. And I had a fantastic feeling that was a sort of Nunc Dimittis feeling, you know . . . "Good lord, this is it!" [Laughter] But my God, she was a wonderful singer ... So I just in a manner of speaking let the tide roll over me. She gave me a cup of tea and I asked her if I could come back. She wasn't too keen on my coming back that night, but I went back that night with a tape recorder and I recorded into the night. That was the first day I met Jeannie Robertson.
Folksong enthusiasts date the modern Scottish folksong revival from that day. This is not to say that Robertson was the first of Scotland's traditional singers to be recorded on tape or disc. James Carpenter had made a field collection in the 1930s while doing research for a Harvard degree.[3]
Earlier in the 1950s Alan Lomax, Seamus Ennis, and Hamish Henderson had recorded little-known Scottish singers. Robertson, still, was the first singer to emerge almost overnight from anonymity among the Scottish folk to become an international celebrity. Her success was not only due to her voice. Equally impressive was her seemingly fathomless repertory, which encompassed both a number of Child ballads-the El Dorado of ballad hunters, then as in previous decades-and a variety of other narrative and lyric songs, ranging from Irish Come-All-Ye's to Scots dialect songs, with a few American country-western favorites thrown in for good measure. When Hamish Henderson turned away from Jeannie Robertson's flat at the end of the first of his many visits, he knew that he had found what he was looking for: a vigorous singer and an intelligent, articulate woman who, with no formal musical training or literary education, could authoritatively interpret the great Scottish oral tradition of narrative song.
The emergence of Jeannie Robertson into the folksong scene of the 1950s set into prominence the place of the Scottish tinkers, or Travellers (as I shall call them),[4] in British folk culture. Previous to the 1950s, social barriers had maintained a sharp division between the "tinks" like Jeannie Robertson, as they were pejoratively called, and the settled population, including even the best folksong collectors. [5]
Footnotes:
1. See Herschel Gower, "Jeannie Robertson: Portrait of a Traditional Singer," Scottish Studies 12 (1968): 118-119, and "Analyzing the Revival: The Influence of Jeannie Robertson," in The Ballad Image: Essays Presented to Bertrand H arris Bronson, ed. James Porter (Los Angeles, 1983), pp. 131-134.
2. Interview of July 19, 1984 (my tape number 840719-1). The conversation is lightly edited. Fieldwork during the summer of 1984 was funded partly by a grant from the American Philosophical Society. Copies of my tapes will be deposited in the Archive of the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh, and in the Folklore Sound Archive of the University of California, Berkeley.
3. The Carpenter collection, which includes recordings from the British Isles and North America, has recently been purchased by the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress.
4. The term "tinkers," besides lending itself easily to insult, is historically inaccurate in that tinsmithing ceased to be an important Traveller trade with the advent of cheap mass-produced substitutes for tin. The term "Traveller" has the disadvantage of potentially encompassing travelling people of all sorts, including tourists, gypsies, and vagabonds. I shall use this term since it is generally preferred by the Travellers themselves.
5. See, for example, Hamish Henderson and Francis Collinson, "New Child Ballad Variants from Oral Tradition," ScottishS tudies9 (1965): 1-33; Peter Hall, "Scottish Tinker Songs," Folk Music Journal 3:1 (1975): 41-62, and articles by Tom Munnelly, Jim Carroll, and Michael Yates in that same issue of the Folk Music Journal; Herschel Gower and James Porter, "Jeannie Robertson: The Child Ballads," ScottishS tudies1 4 (1970): 35-58, "Jeannie Robertson: The 'Other' Ballads," ScottishS tudies1 6 (1972): 139-159, and "Jeannie Robertson: The Lyric Songs," Scottish Studies 21 (1977): 55-103; Ailie Munro, "Lizzie Higgins and the Oral Transmission of Ten Child Ballads," Scottish Studies 1 4 (1970): 155-188; Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, TravellersS' ongsF romE nglanda nd Scotland( London, 1977); and James Porter, "The Turriff Family of Fetterangus: Society, Learning, Creation, and Recreation of Traditional Song," Folk Life 16 (1978): 5-26, and "Parody and Satire as Mediators of Change in the Traditional Songs of Belle Stewart," in Narrative Folksong: New Direction(sE ssaysi n Appreciatioonf W. EdsonR ichmond),e d. Carol L. Edwards and Kathleen E. B. Manley (Boulder, Co., 1985), pp. 303-338. Record albums featuring one or more Traveller singers are too numerous to cite here.
________________
Jeannie Robertson: The Queen Among the Heather (Alan Lomax Collection: Portraits) Vic Smith - 30.10.99
Rounder 1720
In the autumn of 1950, Alan Lomax first came to Scotland to record material for the Columbia Records for their World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series. He had already established that introductions to the singers would be set up by his established contacts; Hamish Henderson, Calum I MacLean and Sorley MacLean. In a 1985 edition of 'Tocher', Hamish explained the programme. "I agreed to assist him in the North-East and asked Sorley and Calum to do likewise in the Gaelic-speaking West, pointing out that the tape-recorder he had brought with him was streets ahead of any other portable recording machine I had so far encountered, and that this seemed a golden opportunity to put on record a good number of the virtuoso tradition-bearers known to them. Both readily and generously agreed to help him, and the result was the first twenty-five copy-tapes in our sound archive."
"Our sound archive?" Well, yes, these were the first tapes to find their way into that vast collection of sound recordings that exists in the School of Scottish Studies of Edinburgh University, probably the finest, most comprehensive - if not the most accessible - national archive of traditional song, music, stories and lore in the world.
The quotation gives some insight into the mind-set that existed at the time. In ragged-arsed, rationed-booked, post-war Britain, there were people who thought that traditional culture was important enough to be worth preserving; but where would this fit into the overall economic rebuilding scheme of things? Suddenly, there arrived of the scene, this relatively rich, confident, technically competent, can-do, go-getter Yank who pointed the way. It's no wonder that Hamish, Ewan MacColl et al thought that the sun shone out a certain part of the Lomax anatomy. No wonder, either, that a younger generation of enthusiasts has reacted against the near-deity status that was accorded to Lomax.
One more contextualising quotation from Hamish before we proceed to the album itself, this time from a 1977 'Tocher'. Hamish is surveying commercially available recordings of traditional Scots song - "First in the field by a long chalk was Columbia, which in 1950 commissioned Alan Lomax ... to compile and edit and series of LPs ... and liaise with the various folklore institutes that were willing to co-operate. In Scotland, there being as yet no School of Scottish Studies, he found himself obliged to operate through individual collectors."
Here I must ask you to read my comments alongside Danny Stradling's review of Margaret Barry's album in this series. My reservations and conclusions on this album are remarkably similar to hers on Margaret's, though I will try to avoid being repetitious.
It was three years after Alan's first visit to Scotland, that Hamish first encountered Jeannie in Aberdeen, following up a lead from another traveller. It's been suggested to me on more than occasion that Hamish took some time to realise the importance of the majestic singer that he had encountered. Whatever the truth of the matter, here was someone very special indeed. Soon, the academics and critics associated with balladry, folk song and lore would be queuing up to heap praise on this Aberdeenshire traveller. Listening to these recordings, it is very difficult not to go along with every effusive word. As an interpreter of traditional songs and ballads, the power, passion, intensity and beauty of her singing has never been bettered in my opinion and there is much here to soothe and delight the ear.
These are amongst the earliest recordings of Jeannie's and she is in great form throughout. The power and purity of her singing here is unmatched in her later recordings. The pace? Well, that has been a problem with Jeannie's singing for some people. It is the only criticism of Jeannie's singing that I am prepared to allow. Sometimes she is simply demonstrating the sheer beauty of that wonderful instrument that is her voice and the story of the song gets neglected. I've been doing a lot of timing of tracks here and comparing them with her later, commercially available recordings. In every case where it is possible to make a direct comparison, the later recordings are longer, obviously indicating a slower pace. Even so, there are items here when she is in no rush! In the song that is normally called What A Voice and here called When My Apron Hung Low, she takes nearly six and a half minutes to deliver the song's 23 lines, and 22 seconds to deliver the words "And he tells ... her a tale ... that he once told me." The swells and pauses in the middle of a line are magnificent, but they do interfere with the flow of the meaning of the words. On the other hand, by her own standards she is positively rushing one of her best known ballads, My Son David (sound clip), but I feel that the performance of this song, always very moving, is enhanced at this pace.
Just why did she slow down her singing, the more she sang in public? That is the interesting question. I was taken to task earlier this year in the letter pages of fRoots magazine for suggesting that "There is no doubt that in later years, Jeannie's head was turned by the vast number of compliments that came her way from the academic community." In many ways, Jeannie was "the modest lady living a modest life" that my critic suggested, but I stand by my comments and would go further to suggest that the mountains of praise were the direct reasons for her changing and slowing her singing style. I find much to dislike in Matthew Barton's booklet notes, but I must concur when he states that "... her singing in later years became more dramatic, even operatic in scale and pathos, as she sang for a more urban, non-traveler [sic] audience. The early recordings ... heard here preserve a less assimilated but more precise and powerful style."
Jeannie's repertoire of songs was huge and wide. The wonder was that there were so many great versions of the old ballads amongst them and a number are here including Son David, Lord Lovatt, thirteen and a half minutes of The Mill O' Tifty's Annie, (here called Bonnie Annie and Andrew Lammie) and the title track. These were the songs that attracted all the folklorists, but Jeannie loved all her songs, and away from the concert/festival stage she would often choose to sing her more bawdy sexual encounter songs. Strangely enough, it's not the big ballads that make the mightiest impact here. She often tackles songs that are a lot stronger than Wi' My Roving Eye (The Overgate), She Was A Rum One and Never Wed An Old Man (sound clip), but her interpretative talent transforms even these slighter pieces into compulsive listening. Rabelais himself would surely have delighted in the last named. If I were asked to name a favourite, it would have to be the one song of Jeannie's that I was unfamiliar with - the way she tells the story of The Handsome Cabin Boy (sound clip) is a tour de force.
There are five sections of interview between Lomax and Jeannie to go with the thirteen songs. My opinion on these has slowly changed with much repeated listening. Initially I cringed at how stilted Jeannie sounded - ill at ease, trying to sort out what this man was after, not at all the relaxed, jokey, cheery person that I remember talking to. And surely he is asking all the wrong questions? Gradually, I came to realise the reasons why. These conversations were recorded on a rare visit to London, whereas almost every time I talked to Jeannie it was on her own ground, at her home in Aberdeen. By then she was used to and confident with the folk scene's pilgrims. Lomax was thousands of miles culturally and economically as well as geographically away from an Aberdeenshire traveller. How could he have known what to ask? He concentrates on the content of the songs and where they were learned from and where they would be sung. These are important questions. They may not have troubled Sharp, Vaughan Williams etc. 50 years earlier. A further 45 years and it is difficult to remember that Lomax was pioneering the process of trying to contextualise the material he was recording.
I don't propose to spend long on discussing the booklet beyond expressing disappointment and wondering, with Danny Stradling in the Margaret Barry review, why on earth the job was given to Matthew Barton. He starts off very unpromisingly by changing Ailie Munro's gender in the first paragraph and fails to improve. There are plenty of people still around who knew Jeannie well and could have written about the wonderful, enigmatic person that she was. The facts are fine, but what was surely needed was a warts'n'all portrait of her great charms and idiosyncracies. She had enough of both to fill several books. Why wasn't, let's say, Ray Fisher asked to contribute an essay? She has a fund of Jeannie stories as well as great love and admiration for the woman.
The notes reach their nadir when we come to the transcription of the words. I'll just mention a couple. In Wi' My Roving Eye the ploughboy is asked to "gae hame tae Auchterady" - whereas to be reunited with The Proclaimers and Jimmy Shand, he needed to return to Auchtermuchty. And then a really lovely one in The Battle o' Harlaw:
"It's did you come frae the hielands, man,
And did you come o'er the Wye?"
Well, no, he didn't. The journey was from Skye to Aberdeenshire, so there seemed little point in making a diversion to Mid-Wales or Herefordshire just to cross a river.
However, in the end we need to put the booklet aside. The recordings are amongst the finest I've heard of the woman who is claimed by many to be Britain's foremost traditional singer and nine of the thirteen songs have never been available commercially before. This would seem to make the album indispensible.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'll finish with a little story. Earlier this year, we had Sheila Stewart staying with us. She was telling us about the album that she had just recorded for release by Topic and she showed me the order of the track listing that had been settled on. In my turn, I showed her the CD re-release of her mother, Belle's album, Queen Among the Heather on the Greentrax label. (I was surprised to hear her say that she knew nothing of the arrangement for the Topic album to be licensed and re-released). I then showed her this album, The Queen Among the Heather, released around the same time and asked her to consider what two of Scotland's great traveller singers would have said if they had been alive when these albums had come out. This greatly amused Sheila as she laughingly speculated on the comments that might have been made on both sides. I then asked her what the title of her forthcoming album was to be and she told me that this was yet to be decided. I said that it was quite common to call the album by the opening track. She looked again at the track listing and saw that the first song was called ... Queen Among the Heather. She fixed me with a stare with her penetrating black eyes and called me something that I don't care to repeat here.
Vic Smith - 30.10.99