US & Canada Versions: 214. The Braes o Yarrow
[I have most of the extant US and Canadian traditional versions in this collection. There are few complete authentic traditional versions of this ballad (and those are perhaps mixed with 215, especially 215C) in North America. Of the 20 versions in my collection (see Contents below) the number of complete authentic versions is 10 with one version additional version based on William Hamilton's poem (Busk Ye, Cox, 1917). Despite the ballad not being found in Appalachia (brought to the Virginia colony) it has surfaced in the Mid-West, mostly from Scottish immigrants (OK-Moores). There is one "cowboy" version from Arkansas that was collected for Parler and by Hunter (see Parler A; Bronson; Hunter).
See the article by Coffin: The "Braes of Yarrow" Tradition in America which is attached to the Recordings & Info page. Coffin's article is missing the traditional versions from the late 1950s, 1960s and on. Eddy's Ohio version titled "Yarrow" is listed under "Rare Willie" but as Child 214 with a question mark after it Niles has 3 versions which were not discussed by Coffin since they were published in 1961 and he did not recognize Niles versions as authentic. All three are far from traditional texts and are likely recreations-- whether they were based on a traditional fragment is unknown. Almeda Riddle's version, titled by Max Hunter as "Fair Willie Drowned In Yarrow," is the text of 215 C which, except for the opening stanza, is found also in the texts of 214, hence the confusion of categorization. Almeida was recorded in 1970 by Wolfe and changed the title to "Banks of the Yarrow," whether her version is traditional or based on print --215C--is the larger question. The 1917 version from Cox titled "The Braes of Yarrow," is based on "Busk Ye" a ballad written by William Hamilton. Hamilton's ballad was likely based on traditional material but should be considered an original adaptation.
The confusion about categorizing each version as either Child 214 or Child 215 was evident with Eddy who wrote 214? after calling it a version of 215. The confusion continues somewhat today. The majority conclusion (see Coffin; Cazden) is that Child 214 and the "Yarrow" versions similar to Child 215 A-E are frequently intermingled and should probably be considered the same ballad-- Child 214.
R. Matteson 2012, 2016]
CONTENTS: (To view individual versions- click title on left hand column; or, click on highlighted blue title below)
1) Dewy Dens of Darrow- Delorme (NY-VT) c.1879 Flanders -- From Flanders, Ancient Ballads III, 1963. Sung by Lily Delorme of Caddyville, NY; on December 4, 1941 as learned from her father who was born in Starksboro, VT. Collected by Flanders/Olney.
2) Braes of Yarrow- McKinney (MA) 1903 Barry B -- From British Ballads from Maine, 1929, p.292. It's a fragment of one stanza and a partial stanza. Sung by Mrs. J. McKinney of Boston, MA. Sung in 1903 and 1908, collected by Barry.
3) The Dreary Dream- Unnamed informant (KY) c.1907 Niles B -- From: The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles; 1961. Sung by a family of "ne'er-do-wells" in Jefferson County, KY, 1907.
4) Busk Ye, Busk Ye- Eagan (WV) 1917 Cox -- My title. From Folk-Songs of the South- 1925; Cox. Contributed by Miss Fannie Eagan, Hinton, Summers County, February, 1917; learned from Miss Amelia G. Bruce, who came from Scotland about twenty years before and had recently returned to Edinburgh to live.
5) The Braes o' Yarrow- Insch (OK) c.1920 Moore B
6) Braes of Yarrow- Young (ME) pre1929 Barry A
7) The Dewy Dales of Yarrow- Mitchell (NL) 1930
8) Braes o' Yarrow- Strachen (OK) c.1930 Moore A
9) The Lady & the Shepherd- Tolliver (KY) 1932 Niles A
10) Lonely Glens of Yarrow- Hadley (TN) 1933 Niles C
11) Yarrow- Small (OH) pre1939 Eddy
12) Dewy Dells of Yarrow- Richards (NH) 1941 Flanders
13) Dewy Dewy Dens- Edwards- (NY) pre1944 Cazden
14) The Dewy Dens of Yarrow- Philbrick (MO) 1957 Hunter
15) The Derry Dems of Arrow- Stanley (AR) 1958 Hunter (Cowboy version)
16) Dewy Dells of Yarrow- MacDonald (ON) 1961 Fowke
17) The Dowie Dens of Yarrow- Fraser (ON) 1962 Fowke
18) Banks of the Yarrow- Riddle (AR) 1965 Wolfe
19) The Banks of Yorrow- Long (WV) pre1973 Gainer
20) The Donny Dims of the Arrow- Ashlaw (NY) 1981
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Flanders notes, Ancient Ballads III, 1963.
Scholarship on Child 214, "The Braes of yarrow," and on 215, "Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow" has suffered much confusion in America. In 1950, T. P. Coffin, in an article in JAF, LXIII, 328-335, attempted to clarify the situation. His findings amount to this (see Coffin, 129-132 for a more detailed summary): The Child A-L series in which a girl's lover is slain by her cruel brother and eight other members of the family for stealing is not found in this country, although collectors have claimed it. what has been found are two fragments of Child 215, "Rare Willie" [see Phillips Barry, British Ballads from Maine, 292, Text B, and Mary
O. Eddy, Ballads and Songs from Ohio (New York, 1939), 69]; a version of William Hamiton's poem that Child cited as influencing his J, K, and L texts [see Child, IV, 163; Allan Ramsey's Tea-Table Miscellany (London 1733), 242; and J. Harrington Cox, Folk Songs of the South (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), 137]; and a few New York and New England versions of the Child Q-S, "The Dowie Dens of Yarrow" ballad in which ten men battle over a girl and in which a dream-reader in the girls family predicts her true love's death. However, since 1950, Norman Cazden has suggested in a NYFQ, Winter, 1952, 242-266 article that Child's 215, "Rare Willie," is really two ballads, one dealing with a drowning at Gamrie and one with a drowning at Yarrow. Furthermore, he feels the Yarrow versions belong rightfully to the tradition of 214. And, in 1958, Mary Celeste Parler printed two southwestern texts of "The Braes of Yarrow." one of these is quite like the usual New York, New England Child Q-S tradition. The other, however, is a cowboy version that appears to have derived from Child L.
The Flanders texts add even more confusion to this already troublesome tradition. Flanders A, while like the Child Q-S series, also shows cerrain similarities to the child A-I series. The third and fourth stanzas of Flanders A include questions and answers not unlike those in Child A, B, and I, while the murder of the lover by the arrow shot from behind the tree is similar to Child D, stanza 7. Flanders B, moreover, includes a stanza, the third, which is not in child's texts of 214 but is found in somewhat similar form in Child 215, D-H. The answer to all this can only lie in the fact that "The Braes of Yarrow" as sung in Child A-L.
"The Braes of Yarrow" as sung in Child Q-S, and "Rare willie Drowned in Yarrow" have become as mixed in oral tradition as they have in the minds of American scholars.
The song includes much superstition from early times: the dream-reader, the blood revenge, the girls drinking the blood of her slain lover, the use of the girl's hair. The original form of the ballad may be quite old, and in this connection it is worth noting that there is a Scandinavian analogue [see MacEdward Leach, The Ballad, Booh (New York, 1955), 570, for a text]. Beyond the references given in Coffin, 129-132 (American), see Dean-Smith, 64 (English); Greig and Keith, 141-144 and Ord , 426 (Scottish). Child, IV, 160 f. discusses possible origins of the story, and Cazden, in addition to taking issue with Child in the NYFQ article cited above, has used the song as a vehicle for remarks on the social significance of balladry in JAF, LXVIII, 201-209.
The two tunes for child 214 seem to be unrelated. The Richards tune is related to various tunes associated with Child 84.
Excerpt from The British Traditional Ballad in North America
by Tristram Coffin 1950, from the section A Critical Biographical Study of the Traditional Ballads of North America
214. THE BRAES OF YARROW
Texts: Barry, Brit Bids Me, 291 / Cox, F-S South, 137 / Siegmeister, Sgs Early Am, 4.0.
Local Titles: The Dewy Dens of Yarrow.
Story Types: A: Seven sons, two of them twins, 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 death-bed, 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.
Examples: Siegmeister (Edward's version).
Discussion: 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 the highlands as she fears her cruel brother will betray him for stealing her from her family (other similar reasons are given in certain texts). 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 three-quarter-length hair about her neck and chokes herself to death, takes her lover'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 have caused the original trouble between the two families. (See Child, IV, 164.)
The Type A text does not follow the Child texts (A-L) summarized above, but rather seems a variation of the Q-S ( The Dowie Dens of T arrow) 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 two titles (Siegmeister's in Sgs Early Am and Child's, Q-S) are almost identical, "dewy" replacing "dowie". The fight among the seven sons over the girl is a logical step from the confused ten lovers beginning in Child Q-S. The presence of the mother, instead of the father or sister, as reader of the dream and encourager of the bereft girl, is no great change, particularly when we note the insertion of the "make my bed" cliche in the Siegmeister text and remember the similarity of this situation to the ones in Barbara Allen (Child 84) and Lady Alice (Child 85) where the mother is present. And, finally, the girl does die in both Child Q and S, even though the dressing in white and the return to the river are not in Child.
The other American texts cannot be traced to Child's The Braes of Yarrow- with any finality. Cox, F-S South, 137 points out that his West Virginia text, which came to America from Scotland, is from the William Hamilton poem that Ramsay printed on p. 242 of the third or London edition of the Tea-Table Miscellany, 1733. (See also Anderson's British Poets, Edinburgh, 1794, IX, 426.) This poem is noted by Child, IV, 163, footnote to have affected his J, K, and particularly L versions. Hamilton based it on the ballad story, and 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, although it is incomplete and the speakers are not marked as in the poem. Stanzas I 6 (Cox i 6) and 1516 (Cox 78) are reproduced with almost no textual variation. Thus the lyricism and poetic style of the sophisticated work have been retained in oral tradition.
The Child Braes of Yarrow undoubtedly came over to Maine in a traditional form. Barry, Brit Bids Me, 291 reports a stanza from what he terms a lost version of Child 214 in a song sung by a Maine woman to the tune of Barbara Allen. The stanza, which begins "Last night I made my bed so wide, Tonight I'll make it narrow", is similar to Stanza 19 in Quid L, but is also of a very conventional nature. Barry also prints a fragment that contains the word "Yarrow" and a stanza similar to one that Child, IV, 179, thought had intruded into Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow (Child 215) from 214. See Child 215 in this study. And, finally, he found another Maine woman who had heard Child A of The Braes of Yarrow sung in Ireland in her youth.
Missing versions:
"Seven Sons" as recorded by Marvin Yale. Cazden: The dramatically apt tune sung by George Edwards for The Dens of Yarrow, and its text as well, were duplicated almost exactly in a version called Seven Sons, sung by Marvin Yale. Its notation has been lost, but a variant of it was recorded ATL 185.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CanRZQLdjUM
Carolyn Hester "Yarrow" 1961 with Bob Dylan (probably no traditional)
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Dens Of Yarrow
Cover by Judy Collins (Text is from Dewy Dewy Dens collected from George Edwards)
There were seven sons and two of them twins
There were seven sons in Yarrow
And they all did fight for their own true love
In the dewy, dewy dens of Yarrow
Oh mother dear, I dreamed a dream
A dream of grief and sorrow
I dreamed I saw my own true love
In the dewy, dewy dens of Yarrow
Oh daughter dear, I saw your dream
Your dream of grief and sorrow
Your love today is laying slay
In the dewy, dewy dens of Yarrow
She sought him up, she sought him down
She sought him all through Yarrow
And there she found him laying slay
In the dewy, dewy dens of Yarrow
Her hair, it was three quarters long
And the color of it was yellow
She rocked it around his middle so small
And carried him home from Yarrow
Oh mother dear, come make my bed
Come make it soft and narrow
For my true love has died tonight
In the dewy, dewy dens of Yarrow
She dressed herself in clean white clothes
And away to the waters of Yarrow
And there she lay her sweet self down
And died on the banks of Yarrow
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*Dewey Dens of Yarrow* (Regional version- based on Edwards?)
Th Dewy dens of Yarrow- Bob Lusk 2006
There were five sons and two were twins
There were five sons of Yarrow
They all did fight for their own true love
In the dewy dens of Yarrow
Oh mother dear I had a dream
A dream of grief and sorrow
I dreamed I was gathering heather blooms
In the dewy dens of Yarrow
Oh daughter dear I read your dream
Your dream of grief and sorrow
Your love, your love is lying slain
In the dewy dens of Yarrow
She sought him up and she sought him down
She sought him all through Yarrow
And then she found him lying slain
In the dewy dens of Yarrow
She washed his face and she combed his hair
She combed it neat and narrow
And then she washed that bloody bloody wound
That he got in the Yarrow
Her hair it was three quarters long
The color it was yellow
She wound it round his waist so small
And took him home from Yarrow
Oh Mother dear go make my bed,
Go make it neat and narrow
My love my love he died for me
I'll die for him to-morrow
Oh daughter dear don't be so grieved
So grieved with grief and sorrow
I'll wedn you to a better one
Than you lost in the Yarrow
She dressed herself in clean white clothes
And away to the waters of Yarrow
And there she laid her own self down
And died on the banks of the Yarrow
The wine that runs through the water deepn
Comes from the sons of Yarrow
They all did fightn for their own true loven
In the dewy dens of Yarrow