Subject: RE: Are racist, but traditional, songs OK?
From:
Jim Carroll
Date: 12 Oct 11 - 07:08 AM
MacColl was required by the producers to include 'Sir Hugh' on The Long Harvest series of Ballads - I know he had qualms about it, but treated it as an eucational exercise and produced the following note for the ballad:
"The Story
Some little (school) hoys are playing ball, usually in the rain. One boy tosses his ball into a garden, or through the window, of a forbidden house. Out comes, usually, the Jew's daughter, (the Jew, a jeweller's daughter, King's daughter. Duke's daughter, aunt and sometimes even the child's mother!) to entice die child in with a scries of desirable objects. She takes him to a remote part of trie house where ins murder, almost ritual in character, takes place. Great emphasis is laid upon the bleeding of the child and the exit of his heart's blood. The child requests the placing of the Bible and Testament at his head and feet and/or is entombed in a sheet or cake of lead and thrown into a well. In the more complete versions, the mother comes looking for her child and holds a conversation with him from the top of the well (as in version A). The child instructs her where and when to meet him, to bring his winding-sheet and to bury him decently.
Child gives eighteen versions, seven Scots, eight English and three North American. Bronson gives sixty-six versions, sixty of which were collected during the present century. Of this number, two are Scots, six are English, one Irish and fifty-one North American. The oldest of Child's texts would seem to be dial from Percy's Reliques (BIB 56, 1-32), in 1765. Child gives excellent notes on the 'historical ' background, but very little about the modernisation or transmission of the ballad. It is generally held to be the ' folk form ' of an old European tale, die ' artistic form ' finding its highest expression the * Prioiesse's Tale ' of Chaucer. E. K. Wells (BIB 61, p. 309) suggests that if the two forms are nut related they at least stem from a common source.
The universally accepted location of the event in this ballad is nearly always Lincoln, although it is frequently referred to as Mirryland, Merry Land Town, Merry Scotland, etc. Even in a related piece which turned up in 1459 among Spanish Franciscans was entitled * Alfonsus of Lincoln'. The ballad is supposed to be founded on the following incident which may have occurred in 1255, which was documented in the Annab of Waverley by a contemporay writer ;
' A boy in Lincoln, named Hugh, was crucified by the Jews in contempt of Christ, with various preliminary tortures. To conceal the act from the Christians, the body, when taken from the cross, was thrown into a running stream; but the water would not endure the wrong done its maker and immediately ejected it upon dry land. The body was then buried in the earth but was found above dry ground the next day. The guilty parties were now very much frightened and quite at their wits end; as a last resort they threw the corpse into a drinking well. The body was seen floating on the water, and, upon its being drawn up, tiic hands and feet were found to be pierced, the head had, as it were, a crown of bloody points and there were various other wounds; from all which it was plain that this was the work of the abominable Jews. A blind woman, touching the bier on which the blessed martyr's corpse was carrying to the church, received her sight, and many other miracles follow. Eighteen Jews, convicted of the crime, and confessing it with their own mouth, were hanged .
Another chronicle of the time actually named the murderer, one Copin, who (it is said) confessed that the Jews crucified one boy each year. The child was interred in Lincoln Cathedral as a martyr and was entered in Christian hagiology as 'Little Saint Hugh' on the tablet above his tomb and the registers of the Cathedral. The tablet was strongly anti-Semitic and has recently been taken down due to public protest, being replaced by the following inscription:
THE SHRINE OF LITTLE SAINT HUGH
Trumped-up stories of "Ritual murders" of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later. These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives. Lincoln had its own legend and the alleged victim was buried in die Cathedral. . . . Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom and so we pray,
REMEMBER NOT LORD OUR OFFENCES NOR THE OFFENCES OF OUR FOREFATHERS'
Child has an excellent passage in which he virtually dismisses the ballad as a piece of religious witch-hunting:
'. . . murders like that of Hugh of Lincoln have been imputed to the Jews for at least 750 years and the charge, which there is reason to suppose may still from time to time be renewed, has brought upon the accused every calamity that the hand of man can inflict: pillage, confiscation, banishment, torture and death, and this in huge proportions. The process of these murders has often been described as a parody of the crucifixion of Jesus. The motive . . . the obtaining of blood for use in the Pasehai rites—a most unhappily devised slander, in stark contradiction with Jewish precept and practice. . . . And these pretended child-murders, with their horrible consequences, are only a part of a persecution which, with all moderation, may be rubricated as the most disgraceful chapter in the history of the human race '.
Indeed, the chronicling of the Hugh of Lincoln murder suggests considerable confusion. There are so many similar events, many of which have the same name for the little victim, taking place in cities all over the Christian world, and happening from the early 1200's up until the present century, that one can only regard the theme of the ballad as a kind of recurring social and economic (rather than religious} catharsis. This century, in 1928, a charge of ritual murder was brought against the Jews of Massena, New York; and the unbelievable atrocities of World War II, to which whole populations in Europe were eye-witness and hence in part responsible, were only logical accumulation of the centuries and centuries of the type of superstition and panic behind the story of little Sir Hugh. It is significant that in several American versions the Jew has become a gypsy, a people also regarded with fear, superstition and ignorance by the settled populations: a people also often accused of child-stealing and persecuted up to modern times in much the same manner as the Jews.
In the mid-1300's, there was a 92-verse Anglo-French ballad, laying heavy emphasis on the role of the Virgin in the song. A miracle versified from an earlier source by Gautier de Coincy some thirty or forty years BEFORE the death of little Hugh, would suggest that parts of the ballad are pure Christian myth. Several scholars make the point that the ballad is an excellent vehicle for the miracle of Our Lady and that the essential religious character of the Jew or Jewess has gradually been excised oul, The boy is often found, in the older version, with the wounds of Christ upon him and he triumphantly cheats death, is raised from the well. Very rarely is the murderer ever punished in the ballad—the ballad ends usually with the boy's instructions to lay him out with the Bible adjacent, or with the miracle of his resurrection.
In the most common American versions, even though the Jew's daughter is the murderess, there are no religious overtones. After all, in the early years of settlement in America Jewry was not persecuted— at least no more than the Indians or the Mormons, and other minorities. In some areas, Appalachia, most parts of New England, Jewry was not even represented in noticeable numbers. New social scapegoats or aristocratic substitutions, such as the * gypsy lady,' or the * Duke's daughter,' took the place of the Jewess. Or else the murder became surely a family affair, or a fragment of a song, as in our versions C and '. In that wonderful ' re-creation ' of the ballad, entitled ' Water Birch,' the murderess is the child's mother. Or just ' they,' as in a Missouri text.
Bclden believes that 'what has kept the ballad alive in America is probably not, however, racial or religious animosity but the simple pathos of the little schoolboy's death '. The religious significance both of the Jewish murderess and the Christian miracle! have both been played down. James Wooddal, on the other hand, suggests (Southern Folklore Quarterly, 1955, pp. 77-84) that sex and mystery, not anti-Semitism, make the ballad and allow it to survive.
Mystery there certainly is—and many superstitions which have dominated European balladry and mythology for centuries before little Sir Hugh met his unfortunate end. For instance, the ritual nature of the murder, the laying of the boy on a table, ' sticking him like a sheep ' and catching his blood in a basin; the ritual of rolling the child in lead and throwing him down a well; the 'ritual' of the conversation between the corpse and its loving mother—these are all variations on stock-in-trade features that so characterise violence in our balladry."
I never once heard him sing the ballad again, despite its superb tune (which he used for one of his own songs 'The Dead Men'
It's difficult to treat songs with offensive themes in this way as many people resent the idea that a folk club should be 'educational' - I once heard Bob Davenport talk loudly through the introductions y a wonderful Irish language singer who felt it necessary to give thumbnail explanations of Irish language songs; Davenport gave the reason for his behaviour as "We came here to listen to singing not f****** talking - I thought we' left this sh*** behind in the 60s" - how can you go against such articulate argument!!!!!
As for altering the texts - bizzarly, an American version of the ballad transforms the killer from a Jew into a Gypsy!
A similar problem emerged in the late 70s with sexist songs; the result being we lost many of our great songs.
On the whole I agree with Vic Smith
No, they're not OK.
unless you can fit them into a context
Jim Carroll
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sj
