The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #42222   Message #619469
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
01-Jan-02 - 12:23 PM
Thread Name: Tune Add: Missing tunes: WANTED - part EIGHT
Subject: RE: Tune Add: Missing tunes: WANTED - part EIGHT
1861)   JOCK SHEEP  In his notes to #112, The Baffled Knight F.J. Child wrote of this:

"There is a Scottish ballad in which the tables are turned upon the maid in the conclusion.  This, as being of comparatively recent, and not of popular, but of low literary origin, cannot be admitted here.  It can be found in Kinloch's Ballad Book, Jock Sheep, p.16, and the Kinloch MSS, I, 229, taken down from the recitation of Miss E. Beattie, Mearnsshire.  Other versions are, in the Campbell MSS, Dernie Hughie, II, 233; Jock Sheep, or, the Maiden Outwitted, Buchan MSS, I, 155."

Kinloch gave no tune, of course, but there are a couple of sets in the Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection (vol.2, 1983, song number 302), one of which has a reasonably full text.  It was noted from Alexander Robb of New Deer, Aberdeenshire, in 1909, and appears originally to have been mis-classified as a version of The Broomfield Hill; as such it appears in Bronson as 43.12, Leatherum Thee Thou and A'.  It was touched on in a discussion back in August,  Lyr Add: Broomfield Wager (4),  but at that time I'd failed to find it in Greig-Duncan as I didn't have my own copy and was of course looking for the wrong title.

The traditional sets all have a chorus; none appears in Kinloch's text quoted in the DT, but that's no surprise, as "literary" ballad editors often omitted them, thinking them silly.  The midi, therefore, is twice as long as the verses in the DT file, to which should be added the following as chorus:

Leatherum thee thou an' a'
Madam aye wi' you,
An' the seal o' me be abrachee,
Fair maiden I'm for you.