"Sally Brown" Part 9 (b)

Thanks, Gibb. I appreciate your fine response. It goes to the heart of some of the questions I was trying to raise in my last post. I realize that I moved into some deep water full of all kinds of things and that I am not at all competent to navigate them. So I appreciate having a pilot.

With regard to the "music" issue in all of this, I keep thinking about what Bronson did with the Child ballad collection tunes. It was usually way beyond me how he grouped different tunes into different "families", but it seemed important, and when I actually focused down on a particular version it was fascinating to discover the relatives. And in some cases, it did establish a link between a Virginia tune, say, and one from England. But of course, one of the great lacunas in Child's work, along with Sharp's work in the Southern Appalachians, and thus also in Bronson, although I think he tried to pay attention to it, was the absence of "Black" music. There is one verse of "Barbara Allen" collected by Sharp right here in Nellysford from an old, ex-slave woman. If only he had taken down the whole song and it had survived!

My comment about the "celtic" sound of "Sally Brown" has more to do with some revivalist interpretations, and especially their instrumental breaks with banjos and fiddles and accordions and penny whistles and bohdrans, etc., than with my own sense of the song. The tune gets twisted in these breaks and seems to move away from itself.

On the other hand, as much as I might wish that I did know more about Jamaican and West Indian music forms, styles and history, I just don't and will have to leave that to someone else. My own personal sense is that this song is West Indian in origin, and certainly - for me - not from Liverpool, but I can't prove it.

Going to the question of origins and predecessors, if we accept for the moment that Mr. Curtis' account of hearing "Sally was a fine girl" as a rowing song on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, in 1830, as an early version of what became "Sally Brown", it raises some intriguing questions. And I'm thinking about the songs in Parrish's book about the Georgia Sea Islanders. While she doesn't have a version of "Sally Brown", she has other songs that were used for rowing. I've never known quite where to place these Georgia Sea Islander songs in my chronological picture. Do they pre-date the use of of these worksongs as chanties at sea later, or have the chanties come back ashore and been adapted for rowing? Or, is it likely that the situation back and forth was always a lot more fluid as it surely must have been with the dock-side loading songs.

Mr. Curtis has (in his own hand with music notation!}:

        "Sally was a fine girl,
        Ho, Sally, ho!"

Seven years later, Marryat has:

        "Sally Brown, of Buble Ally,
        Oh! Sally Brown.
        Sally Brown - oh! my dear Sally.
        Oh! Sally Brown."

To me there seems to be a definite relation. And if you - not me - put in the pulls, maybe that tells us even more. But it doesn't tell me which way the current was flowing. In fact I would probably conclude that some version or versions of the song was being used both at sea and on the river at the same time. Again, the parallels with the dock-loading songs are obvious. We have "Sally Brown" raising the anchor in Portsmouth in 1837 and roughly 30 years later we have her unloading tobacco in Genoa, Italy!

And then we have Mr. Isaac Baker the whaler singing in 1842:

"The Taskar is the thing to roll
O ee roll & go
Her bottom's round as any bowl!
O ho roll & go!"

While he was overtly singing about his good ship the "Tasker", it is not hard to see how this imagery was transferred over to (or from) "Sally Brown". In fact this passage shows up in a contemporary study that was discussing the sexual fantasy life of whalers and how they tended to conflate their thoughts about their beloved ships and women. It is hard to know whether this verse reflects an earlier stream of song that fed into "Sally Brown" or ongoing parallel traditions or is simply independent of it entirely. I think it is definitely connected myself.

And thanks to Lighter we have that delightful note about Mr. Wallack's performance of "Sally Brown" complete with "yelps", from possibly as early as 1808, but at least by about 1825. While it is impossible to know where Wallack learned this song, this note would indicate that "Sally Brown" was fairly well known as a recognizable song that early.

So we have two definite sightings before 1850 and two probables/maybes. And perhaps we have some hints about sources or at least parallel uses. And it's interesting that these two fragments from Curtis and Baker show up from other contexts, rowing and whaling. I think we can almost catch a glimpse of some of the different pieces that came together to form "Sally Brown". I realize that this may be overly optimistic and that my "pieces" post-date what is clearly an already formed chanty but it is a fact that oral traditions continue right along side of written ones, and just because we have written notice in 1808/1825 and in 1837, doesn't mean that these other two fragments weren't passed down from earlier periods.

And, Gibb thanks for the addition from Hercules Robinson! I had a power outage while I was working on this post and lost half of it and had to reconstruct and didn't recheck Mudcat in between. That's a great find. It seems like I've seen that "Dickens commemoration" somewhere. I'll have to go back through my unorganized pile of stuff.