The Young Devils' Song- Lund (ME) 1959 REC
From the recording: BRAVE BOYS New World Records 80239
New England Traditions in Folk Music
by Sandy Paton
Track 2: The Farmer's Curst Wife (Child 278) (Traditional)
Sung by Lewis Lund, Jacksonville, Maine. Recorded by Dr. Edward D. Ives, October 1959. (Used by permission of the Northeast Archive of Folklore and Oral History.)
A humorous ballad of this sort might often have been sung, together with regional ballads of lumbering tragedies, sea songs, music-hall ditties, and popular parlor songs, from the "deacon's seat" in the lumbermen's shanty. Horace Beck tells us:
By far the most important aspect of camp life, as far as folklore was concerned, was the singing. After work in the evenings the card games, storytelling, and making of axe handles was liberally interspersed with singing.
A Michigan singer placed this story in context by explaining: "The devil keeps coming around and taking things away from the farmer according to some pact between them. His cows and horses are taken, until he has only hogs left to plow with" (E. E. Gardner and G. J. Chickering, Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan, Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1967). In most versions of this "very old ballad, steeped in demonology," that have been recovered from tradition, such a pact is only implied. Generally, the farmer appears to be relieved that the devil is after his wife rather than himself or his oldest son, but the D text in British Ballads from Maine, edited by Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, which closely resembles Lewis Lund's, suggests that the farmer "cares for his wife, but considers her capable of holding her own even against the Devil, who in the end has to acknowledge himself beaten and brings her back in order to get rid of her." The editors of that excellent collection remark that all their Maine texts are "characteristically English" in origin, but the ballad itself may have come to England from Scotland centuries ago. The one text from oral tradition published by Francis J. Child was collected in Scotland, and Robert Burns's "Carle of Kelly-Burn Braes" is actually an adaptation of the ballad. Child notes that "a curst wife who was a terror to demons is a feature in a widely spread and highly humorous tale, Oriental and European."
Lund, who sings the ballad here in a fine north-woods style, called it "The Young Devils' Song" and seemed surprised that Dr. Ives would be interested in recording "that old thing!" "Scratch" has been used in England as a nickname for the devil since the eighteenth century.
This recording is from the Northeast Archive of Folklore and Oral History at the University of Maine, Orono.
There was an old man, he had a large farm,
Fee-fol-diddle-fee-dum,
There was an old man, he had a large farm,
He had no oxen to carry it on,
Scratch-a-fol-dee fiddle-fi-dee-fi-dum.
Similarly:
He yoked up his pigs in order to plow,
And down come the devil, sayin', "How are you now?"
"Oh," says the old man, "you're after my life."
"But no," says the devil, "I'm after your wife."
"Go take her, go take her, with all of my heart,
And I hope to God you never will part."
The devil he took her up onto his back,
And down to hell he went clickity-clack.
She saw the young devil preparin' their chains;
She up with the foot and kicked out all his brains.
The young devils began to boost her up higher;
She swung round her leg and knocked nine in the fire.
The young devils began to howl and to bawl,
Say, "Take her out of this, or she will kill us all."
The old devil he done her up into a sack,
And like a damn fool he went luggin' her back.
He lugged her right back to the man with the plow,
Sayin', "Here is your wife, you can live with her now."
"Oh," says the old man, "you've done very well!
You've killed all the devils and reigned over hell."