The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #110435 Message #2316605
Posted By: Joe Offer
15-Apr-08 - 04:42 PM
Thread Name: DTStudy: My Dear Mary Ann
Subject: ADD Version: Mary Ann
I found this version in Folk Songs of Canada (1954), by Edith Fowke and Richard Johnston (pp. 142-143). The exact same version is in the Alan Lomax book, The Folk Songs of North America (pp. 145-146). Lomax says the song was published in Come a-Singing, edited by Marius Barbeau for the National Museum of Canada. And the very same version is #23 in Folk Songs of the Americas, edited by A.L. Lloyd and Isabel Aretz de Ramon y Rivera (Oak Publications, 1965), pp. 40-41.
Mary Ann
Oh, fare thee well, my own true love,
Oh, fare thee well, my dear!
For the ship is a-waiting, the wind blows high,
And I am bound away for the sea, Mary Ann.
And I am bound away for the sea, Mary Ann.
Oh, yonder don't you see the dove a-sitting on the stile?
She is mourning the loss of her own true love,
As I do now, for you, my dear Mary Ann.
As I do now, for you, my dear Mary Ann.
A lobster boiling in the pot,
A blue fish on the hook,
They are suffering long, but it's nothing like
The ache I bear for you, my dear, Mary Ann.
The ache I bear for you, my dear, Mary Ann.
Oh, had I but a flask of gin
With sugar here for two,
And a great big bowl for to mix it in,
I'd pour a drink for you, my dear, Mary Ann.
I'd pour a drink for you, my dear, Mary Ann.
Here are the notes from Fowke/Johnston:Dr. Marius Barbeau heard this unusual sailor's song in 1920 at Tadoussac, Quebec. The singer, Edouard Hovington, who was then ninety, had been for many years a coureur-de-bois employed by the Hudson's Bay Company. He said he had learned "Mary Ann" from an Irish sailor some seventy years earlier, which would carry it back at least to 1850.
"Mary Ann" is obviously descended from the old English song, "The True Lover's Farewell" (which is also the ancestor of "The Turtle Dove" and Burns' "My Luve's Like a Red, Red Rose"), but it is one of the most unusual of the many variants. The nautical references give it a salty flavour quite appropriate to the Tadoussac region, which abounds in tiny fishing villages.