Two Ballads from Allan Cunningham- Brooks 1955
[This is an excerpt with the section about "Bessie Bell and Mary Gray" only]
Two Ballads from Allan Cunningham
E. L. Brooks
Folklore, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Mar., 1955), pp. 231-235
TWO BALLADS FROM ALLAN CUNNINGHAM
Perhaps the two things most readily recalled about Allan Cunningham are that he wrote "A wet sheet and a flowing sea" and that he "palmed off" in R. H. Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1810), a large quantity of his own work as traditional ballads. But just as " A wet sheet" is no criterion upon which to base an estimate of his whole performance as a poet, so his behaviour in the Cromek affair is no gauge of his worth as an antiquary. Cunningham had a genuine love for ballads and ballad themes. He meant to collect and publish a volume of ballads himself, and this may be one reason why he gave Cromek fabrications-he wanted the genuine songs for his own book. Cunningham's collecting seems to have gone on intermittently for a number of years. As late as 1820 we find Sir Walter Scott writing him encouragement to go ahead with his projected volume of Scottish songs. Cunningham had other volumes in preparation, however, and was unable to publish his songs until 1825, when he issued them as The Songs of Scotland.
Like Burns, Cunningham felt that he could render the texts more readable (and, no doubt, more poetic) by revising them. Songs transmitted orally, he believed, inevitably underwent many changes. Where lapses of memory and the furbishings of vanity had already wrought many changes, no objection seemed sustainable if he made alterations of his own. He was essentially a poet, too, and to him the ballads were often rather the materials of poetry than the finished product. The Songs of Scotland, consequently, bear the Cunningham stamp. It has been argued that they are not less attractive for it.
Cunningham, however, was not the man to make indiscriminate changes. Perhaps no better summary has been made of his work as antiquary than that made by Professor S. B. Hustvedt, who says, Cunningham was not the scholar, to distinguish painfully a narrative ballad from a lyric; to him they were all songs. Those which had a fixed form attached to some known poet he left pretty much unmolested; those that were not so circumstanced he treated as a sculptor treats modelling clay.[1]
It is not generally known that an article done by Cunningham for the London Magazine in 1820 [2] contains two still uncollected versions of popular ballads. One of them is "Bessie Bell and Mary Gray", and the other is "Glasgow Peggy", slightly disguised as "Macmoran's Mary".
I should like to repeat a little of what Professor Child has to say of "Bessy Bell and Mary Gray" before giving Cunningham's version of it. Child quotes, of course, the letter of Major Barry, written in 1781, which tells how the two girls withdrew from their residences to a rush-thatched hut to escape the plague but somehow contracted the disease anyway and died from it. He then suggests that perhaps the versions he has presented are imperfect:
The young gentleman who is said to have brought food to Bessy and Mary is sometimes described as the lover of both, sometimes as the lover of one of the pair. Pennant (Tour in Scotland, 1772, Part II, London, 1776, p. 112) says that the ballad was "composed by a lover deeply stricken with the charms of both". In the course of tradition, the lover is said to have perished with the young women, which we might expect to happen if he brought the contagion to the bower. But this lover, who ought to have had his place in the song, appears only in tradition, and his reality may be called in question.[3]
The virtue of Cunningham's version, which he says he got from "Gilpin MacGowan, a Caledonian whom the misfortunes of 1745 had driven to court the refuge of the interior mountains of Cumberland," is that the lover does have his place in the song; he is the singer, and his language is lover's language. And, as Pennant affirmed, he is smitten with the charms of both girls. Consistent, too, with the contention that the lover was the composer is the fact that the poem makes no allusion to the plague: at the time of composition lover and beloved were yet untouched. But Cunningham hastens to admit that the ballad may be "modernized in its descent by means of oral communication". Here it is as it appeared in the London:
BESSIE BELL AND MARY GRAY
A Scottish Ballad
O Bessie Bell, and Mary Gray,
They are two bonnie lasses-
They have left their beds of driven-down
To lie 'mang new mawn rashes;
And they have left the ruddie wine,
To drink the crystal fountain,
And the song of love at gloamin' fa',
For the plover's from the mountain !
Sweet Mary's breath came like the wind,
Blowing o'er a bed of roses,
She sung like the lark to the morning star,
When the shepherd's fold uncloses:
But Bessie's een were founts o' love,
Many her lint-white ringlets wiling,
And her looks came, like the May-morn sun,
To set the world a smiling !
Where the moorland burn 'mang the yellow broom,
Comes bright and gently pouring,
There I maun roam by the light o' the moon
Those lovely ones adoring:
And there one sits, and another sings,
In a bower theeked o'er wi' rashes-
"O, kind love is a lightsome thing
To two leal-hearted lasses ! "
0 can I e'er forget yon bower,
With a' its fragrant blossom,
The smiling o' those lonesome e'en,
And that white and heaving bosom!
For sweet's the joy o' kind sixteen,
When the heart leaps warm and warmer,
At the first touch o' the lily hand
Of a mild and beauteous charmer !
Before The Songs of Scotland came out, Sir Walter Scott had given Cunningham another version of "Bessy Bell and Mary Gray", and it is that version which he uses in the Songs.[4]
Footnotes:
1 Ballad Books and Ballad Men (CambridgeM, ass.: Harvard University Press 1930), p. 34.
2. II, 641-647.
3. English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Part VII (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin,
1890), p. 76.
4. III, 6o.