Recordings & Info 53A. The Turkish Lady
CONTENTS:
1) Alternative Titles
2) Traditional Ballad Index
3) Folk Index (See listing for Child 53. Young Beichan)
4) Child Collection Index (See listing for Child 53. Young Beichan)
5) Mainly Norfolk (lyrics and info)
ATTACHED PAGES: (see left hand column)
1) Roud Number 8124; The Turkish Lady (49 Listings)
Alternative Titles
Turkish Rover
Traditional Ballad Index: Turkish Lady, The [Laws O26]
DESCRIPTION: A British ship is captured by the Turks and its crew enslaved. The singer suffers until his owner offers to free him if he will accept Islam and marry her. He refuses to abandon Christianity. She eventually decides to turn Christian and marry him
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1782 (broadside, "Four Excellent New Songs")
KEYWORDS: love courting religious sailor foreigner
FOUND IN: Canada(Mar) Britain(England(South),Scotland)
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Laws O26, "The Turkish Lady"
Logan, pp. 11-18, "The Turkish Lady" (1 text)
Huntington-Whalemen, pp. 141-143, "The Turkish Lady" (1 text, 1 tune)
Karpeles-Newfoundland 35, "The Turkish Lady" (1 text, 1 tune)
Creighton/Senior, pp. 123-124, "Turkish Rover" (1 text, 1 tune)
Creighton-NovaScotia 13, "Turkish Rover" (1 text, 1 tune)
Mackenzie 17, "The Turkish Lady" (2 texts)
BBI, ZN797, "Down in a cypress grove as I was lying" (?)
DT (53), TURKLADY*
ST LO26 (Full)
Roud #8124
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Harding B 17(322b)[tear: words missing], "The Turkish Lady," T. Birt (London), 1828-1829; also Harding B 11(3907), Firth c.13(303), Harding B 11(1973), Harding B 25(1958), "The Turkish Lady"
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Young Beichan" [Child 53]
cf. "The Araby Maid" (subject)
cf. "Mustang Gray (The Maid of Monterey)" (plot)
cf. "The Belfast Sailor" (theme)
NOTES: This song is sometimes treated as a variant of "Young Beichan" [Child 53]. The setting, obviously, is similar -- but the difference in the ending marks them as separate ballads. "Young Beichan" stresses the lover's return; "The Turkish Lady," the change in the woman's faith (which, incidentally, was a dangerous thing to do: Islam tolerates Christianity, but many Islamic cultures do not tolerate turning from Islam to Christianity. Though the direct comment on an Islamic woman marrying a pagan, in the Quran, Surah 60:11, merely requires the recovery of her dowry). - RBW
Mainly Norfolk: The Turkish Lady
[Roud 8124; Laws O26; Ballad Index LO26; trad.]
The Turkish Lady is a song from the repertoire of Norfolk singer Harry Cox. Peter Kennedy recorded him singing this song at home in Catfield, Norfolk, in October 1953. In 2000, this recording was included on Harry Cox's CD What Will Become of England?. A later recording by Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl from the mid-1960s was included on his 2 CD Topic Records anthology, The Bonny Labouring Boy. Steve Roud commented in the liner notes:
Only collected a few times in England, but several times in Canada, The Turkish Lady is often presumed to be a cut-down version of the very common Young Beichan or Lord Bateman (Roud 40; Child 53), which also has a hero who gets captured by infidels and is set free by a lady. In fact, however, Young Beichan cannot be shown to be earlier than The Turkish Lady, as the latter was certainly known in 1768, when it was transcribed into the journal of the whaling ship Two Brothers (see Gale Huntingdon, Songs the Whalemen Sang (1964)).
Peter Bellamy learned The Turkish Lady from the singing of Harry Cox and sang it in 1969 on his second LP, Fair England's Shore. Peter Bellamy commented in the album's sleeve notes:
Around the middle of the seventeenth century the pirates of the Barbary coast were much in the news, and bristling encounters between British and Arab ships were not uncommon. Many English seamen were captured and lay in chains in the prisons of North Africa, and their plight inspired a number of songs, tragic, adventurous, romantic. The songmakers didn't distinguish between Moors and Turks, so in the ballads the Ottomans often get blamed for the misdeeds of Arabs, as in Lord Bateman, a close relative to the present piece. The Turkish Lady was first printed in a garland date 1782, and fifty years later it appeared, copied verbatim, on a broadside by Catnach. The present version, from Harry Cox, is slightly condensed but in the main follows the broadside word for word, a remarkable evidence of the constancy of some folk song texts and the regulating effect of print upon them. The tune will be recognised as a close variant of the old wedding ceremonial song Come Write Me Down, Ye Powers Above.
Lyrics
Peter Bellamy sings The Turkish Lady
You virgins all I pray draw near
For a pretty story you shall hear:
It is of some Turkish young lady brave
Who fell in love with an English slave.
There was a ship out of London she came.
As she was sailing on the main,
By a Turkish pirate took were they
And they were made all slaves to be.
They bound us down in irons strong,
And then they whipped and they lashed us all day long.
And no tongue may tell that I am sure
What we poor slaves had to endure.
And one of them seaman that were there,
An English man both fresh and fair,
Well, it happened for his lot to be
A slave all to some rich lady.
And she dressed herself up in rich array
Then she went for to view her slaves one day.
And hearing the moan this young man made,
She went to him and thus she said.
“Oh, I pray what countryman are you?”
“I am an English man 'tis true.”
“Well I wish you had been a Turk,” said she,
“I would ease you of your slavery.”
“And if that you had been a Turk,
Then I would ease you of all your slavery work.
And I myself might have been your wife
For I do love you as I love my life.”
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” said he,
“For a slave I am and a slave I will be.
I wouldd sooner die all at the stake
Before I would my God forsake.”
So this lady up all to her chamber she went,
There she spent that night in discontent.
For Cupied with his piercing dart
Had deeply wounded the lady's heart.
And she rose up so early the very next day,
And with her slave she sailed away.
To whips and chains they bid adieu
And this will show what love will do.