WILLIE-O'S SONG CHALLENGE WINNER!

Willie-O's Song Challenge:  The way the contents of Áine's Mudcat Songbook are ordered, the first song listed is my ballad "1743", because the index puts numbered titles in sequence first, then alphabetizes the rest.  So here's my challenge: write a song about a year or event which preceded 1743 AD, (as far back as 1742 BC actually), entitle it accordingly, and knock me out of the top spot! I dare ya!


Virginia Dare (1606) by Lonesome EJ

LEJ's Comments:   Virginia Dare was the first child born to English Colonists in North America.  Her parents were Ananias and Ellinor Dare, Ananias being the Governor of the Roanoke Colony.  She was born the year of the colony's establishment, 1597.  Three months after her birth, Sir Walter Raleigh (the Founder of Roanoke) returned to England for additional supplies and settlers.  The outbreak of hostilities with the Spanish prevented Raleigh's return until 1601, when no trace was found of the Roanoke Colony, other than the word Croatoan carved on a tree.  Genetic studies on a local Native American tribe indicate the presence of European DNA, suggesting the survivors were absorbed into the local Native American population.   My thought behind the song was this:  Had she survived (along with some few others from the Roanoke Colony), Raleigh, her parents, the galleons and England itself would have been well remembered by the surviving adults, but she would know them only through stories.  In a way, they might have become part of a personal mythology to her, a mythology that would seem doubly magical for having no counterpart in her new life.  Life would have been difficult at best living as a member of a native tribe -- I believe she would have seen the galleon sails as s sort of divine intervention.


Each evening as the sun does set, I stand upon the shore
To gaze upon the endless sea, to hear the breakers roar
To seek against horizon's edge the bright returning sails
Until the stars are in the East, and the fading daylight fails. 

It has been nine summers now since my birth in Roanoke
and six years since the fever came to claim my friends and folk
Brave Raleigh swore he would return, when he left with galleons three
But it is nine years, and still no sign of sail upon the sea. 

One hundred twenty-seven souls dwelled in our colony
But hunger and the pestilence brought us down to twenty three
Ananias, my Father, and my Mother Ellinor
Were buried with the others on this dark and foreign shore. 

And though the drought was savage, with little for any to eat
A tribe of Indians took us in and gave us corn and meat
They took us in their canoes from the death at Roanoke
And Will Clarke carved our new home's name "Croatoan" on an oak. 

And I am nine years old now, and these people think it odd
I long for returning strangers, from England's foreign sod
But still I stand upon the shore, and search for foreign sails
Until the stars are in the East, and the fading daylight fails.