Bugaboo from Folk Song in England, as promised
Jim Carroll

Another song among Bell's papers is the earliest-known copy of the familiar and controversial "Foggy dew", about whose title-image ink has flowed and typewriter ribbons grown faint. What is the mysterious 'foggy dew' that so frightens the girl in the song? 'Foggy', we're told, is Middle English for 'coarse rank marsh grass' and so may stand for maidenhead (why?); 'dew' is a familiar folk symbol for chastity (and many things besides); there is a suggestion that the expression is merely a clumsy Anglicization of Irish 'orocedhu' meaning 'darkness, black night', and Robert Graves, always ready to make a bold dash into folklore matters, takes this Irish notion further with the suggestion that the blackness relates to the Black Death which may have been raging at the time of the song's inception (though so far we've no grounds for dating it before the closing years of the eighteenth century) and to the black dress of nuns. So there we are: the girl is not terrified of her coarse rank virginity; she is hammering on a convent door begging the nuns to save her from the plague. The version that Bell received early in the nineteenth century offers another, less spectacular but more convincing explanation. He calls it "The bogle bo", meaning 'ghost', of course.Even "The foggy dew/Bogle bo/Bugaboo", mild as it is, had to wait long before any set of it was printed in full, apart from the broadsides. Where love songs were concerned, the collectors and publishers gave all their preference to the kind of sentimental idylls whose creation nourished particularly towards the middle years of the eighteenth century.