Our Gallant Ship- Tyler (VA) 1932 Davis CC
[My title. From: More Traditional Ballads of Virginia; Davis 1960. I'm including most of Davis' notes. Davis who has all the relevant books does not "do his homework" in his comments on the Mermaid by taking for granted statements from other authors that may not be accurate. This happens occasionally but is rare in printed material by "experts." (See for example Shay's inaccurate comment on the source of "Blow High Blow Low" and how it was not investigated and reported by Laws and others --notes in George Aloe or High Barbaree). Davis, in most cases, is very knowledgeable and his notes are excellent.
The first comment was by Barry (p. 368), "No ballad has less interest to the student than this," which is taken out of context by Henry (Folk Songs from the Southern Highlands-1933) and Davis also seems to miss the point. Barry was simply trying to say that "The Mermaid" wasn't a popular college song just because the ballad was included in a college song book.
Later Davis accepts (through Scarborough 1937) Gummere's contention that Child E is a burlesque, possibly without examining the full quote and looking carefully at Child E.
Notes by Davis follow- I've not included all his notes, the first section was left off.
R. Matteson 2014]
Both British and American texts of the song are quite recent as ballad texts go and many versions show the influence of broadside or songster publication. Kittredge gives an impressive list of such publication of this ballad in JAFL, XXX (July-September, 1917), 333, and Coffin's references (p. 157) add to the list. Barry, among others, is quite shameless in admitting songster texts to full status. He prints as his D text the version from The Forget-Me-Not Songster, and his B text was learned "from a good old songster." Since one of his five texts is only a three-line trace, since one comes from New Brunswick and another from Prince Edward Island, we are left with only a single apparently traditional text from Maine-itself very close to the songster texts. No wonder he concludes (p. 368), "No ballad has less interest to the student than this." There is some general truth in the remark, and the fact is largely due to songster infiltration. When a song has appeared on so many broadsides and in so many songsters, it behooves the folk collector and editor to handle it with care.
The ballad persists in recent English and Scottish tradition. Versions have been collected from the English counties of Cheshire, Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Hampshire, and Oxfordshire, perhaps another one or two. Greig-Keith (pp. 242-43) report five fragments from Aberdeenshire, but print only one, with three tunes. Ord (pp. 333-34) reports a version from the North of Scotland.
Canadian records of the ballad have come from New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. The roster of American states in which the ballad has been found includes Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and Wyoming. In America especially, as suggested above, the ballad owes some of its currency to its appearance on broadsides, in popular songsters, and in college song-books, among them at least three editions of The Forget-Me-Not Songster, Uncle Sam's Naval and, Patriotic Songster, The American College Songster, and the widely distributed Heart Songs. In America, as in Child E, the ballad sometimes takes a burlesque turn.
The statistical record in America would seem to indicate that some folk collectors had been a bit chary about a ballad so well known in print (as well they might be) : TBva, thirteen texts, two tunes; FSVa, three texts, one tune; Barry (see above); Cox (1), one text, no tune, with no text or tune in Cox (1); Sharp-Karpeles, four texts, four tunes; Randolph, three texts, two tunes; Morris, one text, no tune; Eddy, no text or tune; Henry, one text, no tune; Gardner-Chickering, no text or tune; Brown, two texts, one tune; Chappell, one text, one tune; and so on.
Of the three Virginia versions given below, AA is a full text of seven stanzas and is unusual in several ways: it is straightforward narrative, without chorus or refrain; it has four spokesmen: captain, mate, cabin-boy, and (unusually) ship's doctor, who reports a dream of mermaids; the name of the ship is given as "The White-swan" ; and the final stanza records the count of the ship's company and of those saved:
The Whiteswan had four hundred sixty men,
And only nine was saved,
The rest went down, down to the bottom of the sea,
Where the mermaid do stay.
Several of these details, the first and last particularly, connect the text with the longer Child A text, where the corresponding stanza from the middle of the ballad reads:
In all, the number that was on board
Was five hundred and sixty-four,
And all that ever came alive on shore
There was but Poor ninety-five.
American texts that point toward Child A are extremely rare and seem not to have found entrance to the song-books, where the chorus and refrain versions are preferred. Most American texts, like BB below , are shortened forms of the story and tend to follow the Child sequence B-C-D. The tune to BB is a fairly usual one, not unlike certain songster tunes but not known to trace back to any songster. CC, with its unusual avaricious speech of the captain, and the almost comical speech of the "dirty old dishrag" of a cook, has definitely taken a turn to burlesque, like Child tr. It is a pity Mrs. Tyler did not write out the rest of the stanzas. In the three items given below we have a sort of microcosm of the three Child types of the ballad, perhaps of the three American types as well. There is wide variation in the order of stanzas and in the position of the chorus, as here.
CC. [Our Gallant Ship] No local title given. Contributed by Mrs. Royal Holt Tyler, of Madison Heights, Va. Sung by her mother years ago in Mexico, Amherst County. February 15, 1932. Like Child E and some American texts, this version definitely
takes a burlesque turn. See the general headnote, above.
1 Up stepped the captain of our gallant ship,
A very brave man was he.
Said he, "I care more for my coffers and my gold
Than I do for the whole companie." [1]
Chorus
"Oh the stormy winds may blow, blow, blow,
And the raging seas overflow, flow, flow,
And we poor sailors are a toiling at the ropes,
And the landsmen are lying down below.
2 Up stepped the cook of our gallant ship,
A dirty old dishrag was he,
Said he, "I care more for my pots and my pans
Than I do for the whole companie."
And, so on though the list of the crew.
1. company- no reason to change spelling here.