The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #151354   Message #3532067
Posted By: Jim Carroll
30-Jun-13 - 11:14 AM
Thread Name: When I was single Irish Folk ?
Subject: RE: When I was single Irish Folk ?
I was quite staggered to learn that there was so little information on this song - I seem to have known it forever.
The most extensive note I could find on it was in MacColl and Seeger's 'Travellers Songs From England and Scotland' (produced below)
Happy to follow up the references if it's any help - I think we have them all except Cowell.
Jim Carroll.

30 STILL I LOVE HIM
This is probably one of the most frequently reported songs in the British Isles and, undoubtedly, one of the least printed. Texts show considerable regional variation, though the refrains remain consistent and most versions retain the stanza which begins 'When I was single I wore a black shawl'. This would seem to indicate a relationship with 'The Joyful Maid and Sorrowful Wife', a song in which a wife's loss of youth and freedom are symbolically represented through juxtaposed items from her premarital and postmarital wardrobe.
In North America there is a large group of songs with roughly the same theme, usually beginning in the following manner:

When I was single, went dressed all so fine,
Now I am married, go raggedy all the time.
Lord, don't I wish I was a single girl again! (A)

A Glasgow children's street-song of the 1930s expresses similar sentiments in a similar way:

When I was single, I used to go and dance,
Now I am married, I cannae get the chance.
O it's a life, a weary weary life,
It's better to be single than to be a married wife. (B)

In all these single-vs-married songs, a social institution (marriage) is viewed as the source of the heroine's unhappiness. In 'Still I Love Him', however, there is a different emphasis. The institution still exists, the heroine still has much of which to complain, but she has by her side a flesh- and-blood companion - less than perfect, perhaps, but human and therefore capable of inspiring love in spite of the institution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
British Kennedy, p. 460.
General 'The Joyful Maid and Sorrowful Wife': Cowell (unpaginated); JFSS, vol. VIII, pp. 148—50; JEFDSS, vol. III, pp. 51—2; also vol. IV, pp. 5—6; Kidson, pp. 156-7; Mason, p. 42; Ritchie (2), p. 33; Ritson (1), pp. 9-11.
Reference for song from which stanza (B) is quoted above: Buchan and Hall, p. 30.
References for songs from which stanza (A) is quoted above: Belden, pp. 437-9; Randolph, vol. III pp. 69-70.