Subject: RE: Origins: Barbara Allen
From:
Jim Brown
Date: 16 May 15 - 11:18 AM
> It's curious that the Scottish versions…
Hi, Richie. I don't see that much can be read into Sir John becoming Sir James. It obviously means that someone changed the name at some point, perhaps influenced by the sound of "Graeme", but whether this happened in oral transmission among singers or was some printer's choice or accidental slip, I suspect we'll never know. The definite article in "Sir James the Graham" in the "Forget-me-Not Songster" sounds Scottish, but it might just mean that whoever prepared the text for printing was influenced by the language of other ballads, like "The Battle of Harlaw" (Child 163), which has "Oh there I met Sir James the Rose, / Wi him Sir John the Gryme." The first line of the FMNS stanza, "It fell about the Martinmas day" also deviates slightly from Ramsay, but no more than you would expect from someone working from memory who was familiar with other ballads that open in a similar way.
At the risk of hair-splitting, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe doesn't actually specify "seven" ships. What he says in his contribution to the notes in the "Scotish Musical Museum", 1839 (reissued without the songs themselves as "Illustrations of The Lyric Poetry and Music of Scotland. By the Late William Stenhouse" in 1853, which seems to be the edition Child used) is: "I remember that the peasantry of Annandale sang many more verses of this ballad than have appeared in print, but they were of no merit—containing numerous magnificent offers from the lover to his mistress and, among others, some ships, in sight, which may strengthen the belief that this song was composed near the shores of the Solway." This comes as part of Sharpe's response to William Stenhouse's earlier note, obviously referring to Sharpe: "A learned correspondent informs me, that he remembers having heard the ballad frequently sung in Dumfriesshire, where it was said the catastrophe took place …"
Steve has already explained that Sharpe could certainly have seen Buchan's version. But if that is what he was actually talking about, then what reason could he have to lie and pretend that it was something he had heard sung in Allandale? (That was where he grew up – but in Hoddam Castle as the son of the laird, not as one of the "peasantry".) Child states very confidently that Buchan's text is "the ballad referred to" by Sharpe, but the most that can really be said is that both include offers of great wealth (and maybe that's all that Child actually meant). It seems more likely to me that Buchan (or his source) has built onto a version similar to what Sharpe heard. If Sharpe's memory was from his early years in Hoddom Castle (in a letter to Walter Scott in 1802, he talks about how he first got attracted to ballads as a young child, and learned some from his nursemaid – he also mentions some of his early local sources in his "A Ballad Book", 1824), then that would suggest that a version with the offers of rich gifts might have been in circulation in Dumfriesshire in the late 1780s or '90s. It's a pity he doesn't mention whether it also had the gold watch, basin of blood, etc. And of course whether it originated in oral tradition or came from a now lost printed text is impossible to tell – although if you're looking for evidence of an oral tradition independent of print, I would reckon the stanzas about wealth and the legacies are the ones where there is the most chance of finding it.
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sj
