The "Braes of Yarrow" Tradition in America by Tristram P. Coffin
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 63, No. 249 (Jul. - Sep., 1950), pp. 328-335
THE "BRAES OF YARROW" TRADITION IN AMERICA*
By TRISTRAM P. COFFIN
[* This paper was read at the Sixtieth Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society in Toronto, December 29, 1948.]
THE PRIMARY PURPOSE of this study is not to offer new scholarship on the Child ballad in America. Rather, the article is my effort to clear up some confusion that has gathered about "The Braes of Yarrow" (214) and "Rare Willie" (2I5) as they exist in their published New World traditions. Oddly enough, although both these songs are extremely rare in America, a startling amount of foggy and misleading editing has been applied to them. And, in truth, very little matter of complete reliability can be found in both the notes and general editorial set-up of any one published text. A rather cynical analyst of the situation might say that sophistications, texts of Child 214, texts of Child 215, hypotheses, and errors have been carefully intermingled to make up the "Yarrow" notes published so far.
It is time all this were straightened out-if not for the sake of the specialist who is not to be deceived, at least for the sake of the less-suspecting ballad amateur. I wish to approach my problem by the simple method of giving the bibliography of "The Braes" that one can compile from published sources and of then following this list with a discussion of the texts individually. Thus, I can catalogue the material as I go and systematically reach the truth about the song in this country. By such a method, "Rare Willie" will take care of itself.
There are only five references to published texts from the New World tradition of "The Braes of Yarrow." In the order in which I shall discuss them, these read: Elie Siegmeister's "The Dewy Dens of Yarrow," printed on page 40 of Songs of Early America; John Harrington Cox's "The Braes of Yarrow," printed on page 137 of Folk Songs of the South; Phillips Barry's two fragments, given on pages 29I-292 of British Ballads from Maine; and Mary O. Eddy's "Yarrow," to be found on page 69 of Ballads and Songs from Ohio. There are also the notes entered by Cox in The West Virginia School Journal and Educator, Vols. 45 and 46 during 1916, to the effect that the song had been recovered in America. None of the known texts can be said to be both complete and pure, and the last reference can, of course, be forgotten as it is to the Folk Songs of the South entry just noted.
As I shall be more concerned with "The Braes of Yarrow," than with "Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow," in dealing with the first few items, let us now look at the British versions of this song. The story in Child is that of a girl who dreams she has been pulling heather on the braes of Yarrow and wishes her true love not to go to these highlands, as (in most texts) she fears her cruel brother will betray him for stealing her from her family. Nevertheless, while drinking the night before, he has pledged himself to a fight on the braes at dawn and sets out in spite of her pleas. At Yarrow, he is attacked by nine of her family and, although killing four and wounding five, is knifed to death from behind. One of the brothers then goes to tell the sister of the deed. She hastens to the braes and, seeing her lover dead, faints and/or drinks his blood, kisses him, and combs his hair in her grief. She either ties her own 3/4-length hair about her neck and chokes herself to death, takes her love's body home and, pregnant, dies of a broken heart, or refuses the sympathy offered her by her father. In some versions she curses the oxen and kye that caused the original trouble between the families.
The only honest-to-goodness American version, Siegmeister's text, tells a story of seven sons, two of them twins, who battle for their true love in the dens of Yarrow. The girl dreams she has been gathering pretty heather blooms in Yarrow. Her mother reads her dreams to mean that her Jimmy has been slain. The girl then searches him up and down through Yarrow and finds him dead behind a bush. She washes his face, combs his hair, bathes the wound, and, wrapping her yellow hair about his waist, pulls him home. She tells her mother to make her deathbed, and, although her mother promises her a better love than the one slain, she dresses in clean white clothes, goes to the river, and lies down to die on the banks.
This text does not follow the regular Child A-L group (summarized above), but rather is a variation of the Q-S, "The Dowie Dens of Yarrow" series, a group of texts in which ten lovers fight over a girl and in which the father or sister is the dream-reader and clairvoyant of the lover's death. The Child Q-S and Siegmeister titles are almost identical. The fight among the seven sons over the girl,
There were seven sons and two of them twins,
There were seven sons in Yarrow,
And they did fight for their own true love,
In the dewy, dewy dens of Yarrow. [2]
is a logical step from the confused "ten lovers" beginning of Child Q-S.
There lived a lady in the West,
I neer could find her marrow;
She was courted by nine gentlemen
And a ploughboy-lad in Yarrow.
These nine sat drinking at the wine,
Sat drinking wine in Yarrow;
They made a vow among themselves
To fight for her in Yarrow.[3]
The presence of the mother, instead of the father or sister, as encourager of the bereft girl and reader of the dream is no great change, particularly when we note the insertion of the "make my bed" cliche and remember the similarity of the situation to the ones in "Barbara Allen" and "Lady Alice," where the mother is present.
Oh, mother dear, go make my bed,
Go make it neat and narrow;
For my love died last night for me,
I will die for him tomorrow.[4]
And, finally, her dressing in white and going to the river to die is not in the Child texts, although the girl does die in both Q and S. Siegmeister, of course, makes no attempt to account for his text, and, even if his ballad seems to have absorbed the ending of another song as well as a stock stanza, the version is a pretty good one. Barry's first fragment,
Last night I made my bed so wide,
Tonight I'll make it narrow:
With a pretty baby at my side,
And a dead man for its father.[5]
is of such a common sort that it seems a bit "over-anxious" of him to claim it as a part of the Child 214 tradition. The lines are, however, similar to Stanza 19 of Child L,
I meant to make my bed fu wide,
But you may make it narrow:
For now I've nane to be my guide
But a deid man drowned in Yarrow.
but, at the same time, being of a conventional nature and appearing in a lyric that was sung to a tune of "Barbara Allen," they cannot be greeted with very much enthusiasm. His second fragment I wish to reserve for discussion later on, but I will note that Barry found an Irish woman in Isleford, a small town in Maine, who recognized the Child A text of "The Braes" as a song she had heard sung in her youth, and he is probably correct in his assumption that the song was brought to America from Ireland. I have no bone to pick with Barry or Siegmeister. In fact, I feel that the material that they have given us is the only genuine material published to date from the American tradition of Child 214.
The text that Cox prints troubles me, however. He has included, under the Child number, 214, a few stanzas of William Hamilton's poem, "The Braes of Yarrow," that were found in West Virginian oral tradition. Cox, as of course he would, states clearly in a headnote that the text he has collected is from the sophisticated source, but to my mind he has no right to place it in with his Child texts. Hamilton's poem, which was printed by Ramsay on page 242 of the 3rd or London edition of The Tea-Table Miscellany of I733, but is more easily found today on page 426 of Anderson's British Poets, Edinburgh, 1794, Vol. IX, is based on the story of the ballad. It consists of a conversation between three speakers. A man is requesting a bride to forget her past and rejoice in him, while a friend wonders why she is so sad and what story lies behind the situation. It is then revealed that the man has slain the girl's lover on the braes of Yarrow, and she cannot forgive him or forget. The poem ends indefinitely, with the new lover still trying to persuade the girl of the futility of her mourning.
The Cox text retains this story in a general way, although in oral tradition the narrative is incomplete, and the speakers are not marked. Hamilton Stanzas i-6, which are paralleled by Cox Stanzas 1-6, and Hamilton Stanzas 15-16, which are paralleled by Cox Stanzas 7-8, are reproduced with almost no textual variation. The following eight lines, the first four from Hamilton and the second four from Cox, illustrate how well the lyricism and poetic style of the sophisticated verse have been retained in oral tradition.
Fair was thy luve, fair fair indeed thy luve,
In floury bands thou him didst fetter,
Though he was fair and weil belov'd again,
Than me he never lued thee better.[6]
Fair was thy love, fair, fair indeed thy love,
In flowery bands thou didst him fetter;
Tho' he was fair and well beloved again,
Than me, he did not love thee better.[7]
In spite of the fact that Child8 notes that the Hamilton poem has affected his J, K, and particularly L versions, there seems to me no excuse to include this sort of material as a part of the Child tradition in America. Hamilton's work is not as close to folk poetry as Scott's "Lochinvar" or Swinburne's experiments-even though a folk-singer may have sung the lines to a folk melody and even though the forces of oral tradition may have begun to work upon the language of the poem.
This leaves, then, the Eddy text from Ohio and Barry's second fragment to be given consideration. Neither of these belongs to "The Braes of Yarrow" tradition, however. Rather, they are part of an American tradition of Child 215, "Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow," the A-C series. Confusion has clouded these texts because of the extreme corruption of "Rare Willie" by "The Braes" in the British versions, and this confusion has served to baffle American editors no end.
The story of 215 in Child is as follows: Willie, his mother's darling, fails to get parental blessing for his marriage. On the way to the church, he is washed from his horse while crossing a river. The bride, hearing what has happened, sets out to find the missing groom. In texts A, B, and C she discovers the body in the cleft of a rock and in B and C, by wrapping her 3/4-length hair about Willie's waist, draws him from the water. These three "southern" versions (A, B, and C) give none of the action before the search except to state that Willie is to marry a girl. Child says that this group belongs to an older tradition,[9] and it is probable that these texts originally contained a similar, if not identical, story to the one given here from the "northern" texts. Child also points out that the wrapping of the hair about the lover's waist in 2I5B and C belongs to "The Braes," as do the "dream," the "letter," and the "wide and narrow bed" stanzas of the six-stanza 215C. And the situation becomes further confused when he notes'? that the drowning of 214L probably belongs to 215.
Miss Eddy's publication of her Ohio "Yarrow" symbolizes this confusion rather aptly, if rather unfortunately. She prints her text under the contradictory heading "Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow" (Child 214). This might seem to be a typographical error, only she follows the ballad with an equally baffling note. She states that, "Mrs. Small (her informant) learned this from a cousin in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire, Scotland. In respect to the hair episode, this text resembles Child's B version." However, does she mean Child 214B or 215B? Both contain hair-pulling episodes. And her list of "other texts" is made up of references to Barry's two fragments and the John Ord, Bothy Songs and Ballads, page 454 text. Barry's lines are listed under "The Braes of Yarrow" title, while Ord prints a text of the northern tradition of "Rare Willie."
Actually, the Eddy text is quite similar to Child 215C, and the song undoubtedly crossed the ocean already corrupted by a large amount of material borrowed from the British 214 texts. To make my statement clear, let me discuss the stanzas one by one. The Ohio ballad [12] opens with the following lines:
My Willie's rare, my Willie's fair,
My Willie's wondrous bonnie,
He promised he would marry me,
If ever he married ony.
These lines are paralleled by both the A and C versions of Child's "Rare Willie." The first stanza of C reads as follows.
Willie's fair, an Willie's rare,
An Willie's wondrous bonny
An Willie's promised to marry me
If eer he married ony.
The second stanza of the Ohio song is not found in Child, but is of a conventional sort and turns up in similar forms in many love songs.
My Willie's tae the huntin' gane,
Afraid that he would tarry;
He sent a letter back to me
That he was too young to marry.
I am inclined to believe that these lines are little more than a corruption. However, the mention of the hunt is of interest, as almost all of the Child 214 texts include this feature. The third stanza,
Last night I had a dreary dream,
It caused me pain and sorrow;
I dreampt I was pulling heather so green,
High up on the braes of Yarrow.
is much the same as the second stanza of 215C, lines which Child claimed to have been borrowed from "The Braes." The British text reads,
O sister dear, I've dreamed a dream,
I'm afraid its unco sorrow,
I dreamed I was pu'in the heather green,
In the dowie dens o Yarrow.
Eddy's fourth stanza,
She wandered up, she wandered down,
High up on the hills of Yarrow,
And right beneath a rock she found
Her true love drowned in Yarrow.
relates to 214 in the girl's going up a hill to spy her lover and is closest to, 2I4J, Stanza 14 of all the Child stantas in the two ballads. The drowning however, is like 215, and thus like 2I4L also, while the use of a rock as the repository of the body is in 2I5A and B. The final Ohio stanza,
Her hair it was three quarters long,
The color of it was yellow;
She turned it 'round her Willie's waist
And pulled him out of Yarrow.
compares closely to 215C, Stanza 5 and 2I5B, Stanza 2. That from C is given below.
Her hair it was three quarters long,
Its colour it was yellow;
She tied it to his middle sma',
And pu'ed him out o Yarrow.
In summary, then, of the five stanzas in the Eddy text, three are closely paralleled by similar stanzas in Child 215C, one of these having crossed over from 214 in earlier British tradition. Concerning the other two stanzas, one is of a conventional nature that might have entered the song at any time; while the other resembles both the tradition of "The Braes" and the tradition of "Rare Willie" where "Rare Willie" has contacted "The Braes." This evidence, thus, serves to indicate that Miss Eddy's text is a version of 215 and perhaps a variant of 215C. Phillips Barry prints the fragment that follows in his collection of ballads from Maine.
Oh mother, dear, oh, make my bed,
Oh, make it both long and narrow,-
Since Willie has died for me today,
I'll die for him tomorrow. [13]
There is also a second stanza, the only bit remaining of which is the line, "Between two hills of Yarrow." The first two lines of the complete stanza appear in almost the same form in Child 215A, Stanza 2 and resemble material to be found in Child 214H, Stanza I7. As Child felt that Stanza 2 of 2I5A had entered "Rare Willie" from "The Braes," Barry has included this fragment under 214 in his book, even though the name Willie appears in his find. In view of Miss Eddy's text, this may have been a mistake. What then does this hurried inspection of "The Braes of Yarrow" tradition tell us? When re-evaluated it indicates in a direct way four major facts.
Firstly, Child 215 ("Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow") is certainly in Ohio oral tradition, even though the version located by Miss Eddy is, like Child's C text, badly corrupted by contact with the tradition of 214. Secondly, Barry may just as well have found a text of 2I5 in Maine, although he lists his find under "The Braes of Yarrow" heading. Thirdly, "The Braes of Yarrow" itself is even rarer in America than a quick look at the present bibliography might indicate, there being no text of the real story (Child A-L) yet published as a New World discovery, although the derived British series (Child Q-S) is represented by one complete ballad. And, finally, there seem to be one or two fragments that are candidates for places in the tradition of this song.
Indirectly, however, two points of more importance are indicated by the above re-evaluation. Firstly, too many ballad editors, in their eagerness to find new versions and variants of Child songs in America, have permitted themselves to be led astray by their hopes and enthusiasm to the result that our "Child" collections often contain material which is only very remotely connected with traditional balladry. I do not mean to seem over-critical of Cox, whose work in folk poetry has been indispensable and extremely sound. The sort of over-anxiousness represented by his inclusion of Hamilton's poem with the Child text is not unique. The "dove and pine" stanzas, which can be found in innumerable American folk songs, are rationalized into being a text of "Lady Alice" in Gardner and Chickering's Southern Michigan collection;[14] the "shoe my foot" lines, which certainly are found in the British "Lass of Roch Royal," but which also appear in twenty-four or more American songs, often have been seized as the sole chance of an editor to include Child 76 in his collection; and everyone is familiar with the derivatives of "Erlinton," "The Marriage of Sir Gawain," "The Brown Girl," "Katherine Jaffrey," etc., that are continually appearing with Child numbers attached. I do wish to point out, nevertheless, that the days in which collection of material is the foremost task of the ballad scholar in America is nearing a close. The greatest bulk of the Child scholarship of the future must, of necessity, center about the examination and correlation of the material already published and collected. This being the case, it is important that we be not deceived by the "freedoms" taken in the past when such freedoms might have been justified by the scarcity of material. The fate of "The Braes of Yarrow" in this country indicates the sort of thing that now must be corrected and guarded against so that we can know clearly what we really have and what we merely wish we had.
Secondly, and along the same lines, this re-evaluation brings into focus the idea that ballad editors of the future cannot in fairness to the men who wish to examine the collected material fail to make an accurate correlation of their material with Child's texts and subsequent British tradition. Inaccuracy here doubles the work of the future student. Again, let me emphasize that I do not mean to single Miss Eddy's book out for criticism. The work is an excellent one and sound in every other respect in which I have examined it. It just so happens that her "Rare Willie" is a part of my study. I have the same criticism to direct at other collections. In the Vermont Historical Society, Proceedings, N.S., VII, 201 there is a text of "The Twa Brothers" printed as "Edward" because the "Edward"-ending has become attached to the first ballad as it so often does. Even a quick look at the Child notes [15] tells one the song is Child 49 and not Child 13. But that quick look was not taken.
Thus, "The Braes of Yarrow" tradition in America deserves a second thought-not only in its facts, but also in its implications. It holds a lesson for the future, and, perhaps, a warning about some of the past.
Denison University,
Granville, Ohio
1. This paper was read at the Sixtieth Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society in Toronto, December 29, 1948.]
2 Siegmeister, Stanza 1.
3 Child 214Q, Stanzas 1-2.
4 Siegmeister, Stanza 7.
5 Barry A Stanza 4.
6. Hamilton, Stanza 15.
7. Cox, Stanza 7.
8. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, IV, 163.
9 Ibid., p. 178.
10 Ibid., p. 163, footnote.
11 Eddy, Ballads and Songs from Ohio, p. 70.
12 The stanzas quoted below are from ibid., pp. 69-70 unless it is otherwise indicated.
13 Barry B, Stanza I.
14 E. E. Gardner & G. J. Chickering, Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan, p. 53.
15 Child, op. cit., I, 167.