Pretty Polly- Aylward (NL) 1929 Karpeles
[My title, replacing the generic Outlandish Knight. From Karpeles 1934 book, "Folk Songs from Newfoundland." Reprinted by Faber and Faber in 1971 as Folk Songs from Newfoundland. Last stanza from Karpeles MS.
I've included several excerpts following my notes.
R. Matteson 2014]
Wiki: Sharp died in 1924, but just beforehand, he had expressed a wish to search for songs in Newfoundland. His theory predicted that the emigrants from Scotland and England would have brought folk songs with them. They would still be found there, if anyone cared to look. Karpeles took up the challenge, and went there alone in 1929 and 1930, In 1934 "Folk Songs from Newfoundland" was published, possibly her greatest achievement.
Fonds description written by Anita Best: Maud Karpeles (1885-1976) was born in London, England to a family of international connections. After finishing her education she took up social work and “while looking for something creative for a girl’s club to do, she heard of Cecil Sharp’s rediscovery of English traditional dances.” She became immediately involved in this study and with her sister (mother of folksong collector Peter Kennedy) she became one of the demonstration team who illustrated Sharp’s lectures throughout England. She continued to work with Sharp when he started collecting folksongs in 1903 and became as interested in the songs as she was in the dances, attending summer schools and learning the songs as they were collected. Being associated with the work from the earliest days, she became an authority on folksong in her own right as well as Sharp’s assistant and collaborator. During the First World War, Karpeles travelled with Sharp in the Appalachian Mountains, where they found a large number of songs that had come over with the early immigrants and had remained virtually unchanged for several generations.
After Sharp’s death, she spent about fourteen weeks in Newfoundland during 1929 and 1930 and made a collection of songs, 90 of which were published by Faber and Faber in 1971 as Folk Songs from Newfoundland. With collaborator Ralph Vaughn Williams, she published several dozen of these songs for formal performance with piano accompaniment.
Song Collecting in Newfoundland: Maud Karpeles, 1929 by David Gregory, Athabasca University
The Bonavista Peninsula
So Maud set out on September 12th. From St. John’s she took the narrow-gauge railway to Clarenville, enjoying the “perfectly gorgeous” scenery until nightfall. She had to change trains in the middle of the night, but she eventually arrived at Trinity at 4.30 am. After finding somewhere to lodge, she took the ferry to East Trinity. Here she listened to the local school-children playing “the usual singing games,” and then started looking for songs. Walking up a hill, she found a man chopping wood and made friends with him and his wife. This was where she found her first folksong in Newfoundland, a variant of Child ballad #85, “Lady Alice,” which the singer, Mrs. Mary Tibbs, called “Young Collins.”[18]
But she soon decided that the Trinity area was not very promising, and decided to try the outports on Bonavista Bay, further north and further west. Had she but known, her luck was about to change. She made her way over bumpy mud-and-gravel roads to King’s Cove on the northern shore of the Bonavista peninsula, which she would make her base for visiting the nearby outports of Stock Cove, Tickle Cove, Broad Cove and Openhall. In King's Cove she took lodgings with Mrs. John Brown, the wife of a schooner captain. Her candid comments on the family and her living arrangements reveal something of material and religious life in the outports at the time:
A nice large bedroom with comfortable clean bed, but alas windows do not open. Flies in living rooms very trying. Staple diet seems to be tinned rabbit. Practically no fresh food, and no idea of what’s nourishing. But water good and tea, also home-made jam. Sanitary arrangements literally nil, and scarcity of water – hot and cold...[At evening prayers the captain] addresses the Lord as tho’ he were a long way off. They are nice, simple people.[19]
On the 18th September, she took a taxi to Stock Cove, three miles away. This was a poverty-stricken Irish hamlet, but it proved a most fruitful source of songs. This extract from Maud’s field-diary gives the flavour of the community and her reception in it:
Called on Joanie Ryan, a half-daft woman of 80 or more...Got her to sing and with utmost difficulty took down tune and words. The room gradually filled with men, women and children, and before I had finished there must have been about a dozen people there – all highly interested and entertained. Then went on to see old Mrs. Mahoney, and from there got passed on from one person to another. Everyone most friendly and delighted to see me. My calling on Joanie Ryan evidently tickled their fancies...They are all Irish people and I might be in an Irish village. Evidently a lot of songs about, but they have got covered up by the new songs and most people have to dig into their memories to recall them…I sang and taught them a figure of Running set, much to their delight. Got back about 1 am.[20]
This was more like what Maud had been hoping for. The song that old Mrs. Joanie Ryan sang was “The Maid on the Shore.” The next afternoon she was back at Stock Cove, and found another warm welcome.[21]
She discovered that there were several other singers there, although she had some difficulty with the Irish accents and with sorting out who was who. It turned out that members of three different families―the Mahoneys, the Alwards, and the Brennans―each knew a version of the Child ballad “Sweet William's Ghost” (Child #77). Matthew Aylward also per-formed full versions of “The Outlandish Knight” and“The Grey Cock.”
Child Ballads
I THE OUTLANDISH KNIGHT
(Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight)
[Pretty Polly] Sung by Mr. Matthew Aylward at Stock Cove, Bonavista Bay, 20th, September 1929
Give me some of your dada's gold
And some of your mamma's fee,
And the very best nag in your father's barn
Where there lies thirty and three.
So he rode then along, along,
Till he came to a river-side,
Alight, alight, says he,
Six fair I have a-drowned here
And You the seventh shall be.
Six fair pretty maids you have a-drowned here
And why do you do so by me?
You promised you'd marry me when you came to Green Fields
And both would married be.
Take off your rich, your costly robe
And lay it down by me.
For it is too rich and too costly
To rot in the salt sea.
O turn, O turn, Young Willie, she says,
O turn Your back to me;
Pretty Polly she took him all into her arms
And throwed him into the sea.
Lie there, lie there, false Willie, she says,
Lie there instead of me.
You thought you'd strip me as I was born,
Not one lack [?] did I take from thee.
And then she mounted her meelyer [sic] bright
And faced the green apple tree.
She rode along, along and along
This long summer's day.
She rode till she came to her father's hall,
Hearing what the parrot did say:
Where were you, my pretty Polly,
This livelong summer's day?
O hush, O hush, pretty Polly, she says,
Don't tell no tales of me.
Your cage shall be made of the glittering gold
And your door of ivory.
Her father was in the very next room
Hearing what the parrot did say.
What is the matter with pretty Polly,
She chatters so long before day.
Those cats are coming against my cage-door
Trying to make war against me,
And I am calling for pretty Polly
To drive those cats away.
Crow up, crow up, my little bird,
And don't crow before it's day,
And your cage shall be made of the glittering gold, she said
And the doors of the silver so grey.