Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: MMario
Date: 27 Jun 02 - 10:28 AM

Orac - "leman" may be odd and obselete - but just about any reader of Historical smut Romance novels knows the word and its meaning. Probably the one good thing that can be said about Harliquin Romances. They do build people's vocabulary.

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: Richie
Date: 18 Jan 12 - 08:51 AM

Hi,

I've put some of my thoughts about the ballad on my site:

http://bluegrassmessengers.com/26-the-three-ravens-or-twa-corbies.aspx

I've also quoted Malcolm from this thread,

Richie

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 18 Jan 12 - 09:09 AM

I sing a quite different text, from The Legendary Ballads of England and Scotland compiled & edited by John S. Roberts, Chandos Classics 1900 (?) from Mr. Motherwell's Collection; otherwise unknown...

There were twa corbies sat on a tree; large & black as black might be;
an' the ane unto the ither gan say: aye, where shall we gan & dine today?
Shall we dine by the wild salt sea? Or shall we dine 'neath the greenwood tree?

As I sat by the deep sea strand, I saw a fair ship nigh at land;
I waved my wings I beat my beak, that ship it sunk & I heard the shriek.
The drowned ones lie, one, two & tree; I shall dine by the wild salt sea.

Come and I'll show ye a sweeter sight, there's a lonesome glen & a new slain knight;
an' his blood yet on the grass is hot; his sword half drawn, his shafts unshot.
And no one knows that he lies there, but his hawk, & his hound, & his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone; his hawk tae fetch the wild fowl hame;
and his lady's awa' with another man, so we maun make our dinner long:
our dinner's sure, our feasting free, come & dine 'neath the greenwood tree.

Ye shall sit out on his white hause-bane, while I'll pike oot his bonny blue een;
An' ye'll take a tree of his yellow hair to theek wa nest when it grows bare:
the gowlden down on his young chin will do tae row my young ones in.

Aye cold and bare his bed will be when winter storms sing in the tree;
At his head a turf, at his feet a stone; he'll sleep nor hear the maiden's moan
Ower his white bones the birds shall fly, the wild dear bound & foxes cry.

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: Lighter
Date: 18 Jan 12 - 09:53 AM

Thanks, Mick. An important printing.

Here's a splendid midi of "Ye Banks and Braes":

http://www.contemplator.com/scotland/bonidoon.html

It was also sometimes used for the text of "The Foggy, Foggy Dew." Works great for that too. In fact, I prefer it to the usual.

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: Richie
Date: 18 Jan 12 - 10:51 AM

Hi,

The text above from The Legendary Ballads of England and Scotland compiled & edited by John S. Roberts, Chandos Classics 1900 is by Allan Cunningham, 1925.

It was written by Cunningham based on the extant versions and is not traditional.

Interestingly- there's already a version in the DT which is the second version collected of Cunningham's Scottish ballad in the US (See: Henry A, c. 1900). After Cunningham's Two Crows was published in Cleveland's Compendium (Philadephia, 1848, with subsequent editions reprinted in 1859 etc.) it began surfacing as a traditional ballad, but it was learned from this book- directly or second hand. The orginal, from Allan Cunningham, was printed in 1825 in Cunningham's Songs of Scotland, Vol. I, pp. 289-290. Cunningham rewrote Scott's (See Twa Corbies- Child A a.) and Ravenscroft's text (See Child A Three Ravens). I'll give Cunningham's original below.]

Here's the DT version title:

THE TWO RAVENS- From Mountain Minstrelsy of Pennsylvania, Shoemaker 1931 Long popular in Clinton County, One of Clarence Walton's favorites.

Richie

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: Richie
Date: 18 Jan 12 - 11:07 AM

Hi,

Above post should be Alan Cunningham 1825 (what's 100 years anyway!!!)

Haha

Richie

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 22 Jan 12 - 09:20 AM

It was written by Cunningham based on the extant versions and is not traditional.

Sorry I missed this earlier; I was alerted to it earlier today by email & my initial response was to just let it lie, but the more I think about this idea of and is not Traditional so the more it vexes me. I'm sure my email correspondent will forgive me if I use my earlier reply to form the basis of this post (and I'm sure, if he wants, he might add some other fascinating glimpses on the subject of Cunningham).

As far as The Traditional is concerned, I still prefer George Mackay Brown's John Barleycorn to any of the so-called Traditional versions of the song, and this is certainly the case with respect of Cunningham's Corbies which is a far more toothsome piece than Scott's (and I've never much liked the An Arlac'h setting that many now think of being Tradition in itself). I feel 1825 has a hoary ancientness about it; it is very much Pre-Folk / Pre-Revival and chimes in heartily with the literary Balladry that proliferated at the time. Look at (say) Bell's Rhymes of the Northern Bards, which remains my earliest source for The Collier's Rant, a song I've never seen any 'folk processed' variations of, but was deemed significant enough to be included in that context, as well as in Crawhall's later Buek o' Newcassell Sangs (1888) with other material by known authors working in The Idiom at the time. So...   All songs were written by someone, and just because we know who wrote them doesn't make them any less Trad. - it just makes them anon.. Think of George Bruce Thompson's epic McGintine's Meal an Ale, the text of which was quickly assimilated into the both Grieg and Duncan Collection and the repertoir of such singers as Davie Stewart; think also of Tommy Armstrong & the other poetic song-makers whose muse is rooted deep in The Tradition, as oppose to the Idea of a Tradition, howe'er sae nebulous that Tradition may be - all the more so for the inclusion of such material.

As for Cunningham's Corbies, I've been singing it (to my own tune) for 25 years now thinking the text was anonymous. After all, all texts are anonymous until we find out who made them, or remade them, so do we think of this text as being folk processed or not? And why not? As I say, it's a vexing question not without easy answer unless one proceeds with the usual lines of Cultural Apartheid on which the Folk Revival is predicated as being a harvesting of the unlettered authentic by the very lettered paternalistic academia. However so quaint that notion may be (and however so sincere its exponents over the past century and more) I can't help but feel that the more one delves, so the more complex it gets, not just in terms of the material, but the philosophical approach of what we can consider as being Traditional and what we can't.

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: GUEST,raymond greenoaken
Date: 22 Jan 12 - 04:36 PM

I too am hopelessly in thrall to this version, and filled with awe that we can now put a name to it. Allan Cunningham was nearly buried a mile from where I live...but it didn't quite work out.

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: Paul Burke
Date: 22 Jan 12 - 06:39 PM

It would be very interesting to know how many of (say) Scott's ballads were original, titivated, or the whole cloth. Not that it matters much.

We know the song is 16th/17th century, but was it half as cynical then? Printed versions are all the evidence we have.

He had a pimple on his head,
Down a down hey down a down,
The more he picked it, the more it bled,
With a down
He had another on his bum
And that one made him very glum,
With a down, derry derry down a down

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: Bill D
Date: 22 Jan 12 - 07:07 PM

As to 'traditional' vs. 'anon' vs. 'known composer'.... there are songs *I* prefer to whatever passes for the 'original'. It is often the case that many minds over dozens or hundreds of years can improve on both words & tunes--- but I DO prefer to know how & why they were changed, and much of the fun of 'folk' is tracing and comparing the history of versions.

I also am sure that many people's favorite version tends toward the one they heard first...especially if they have known & sung it for many years. (We see that here in requests for "Joe Blow's version" of 'The Ballad of Flatulent Fred'...often wanting chords & midis, also)

It is just hard to mentally edit something that has become part of you. There are a number of songs I learned in the hinterlands of faraway Kansas, in the 1960s, that I have since discovered were either bowdlerized, shortened, of simply 'pop' versions.. (for example the risque little ditty "The Bastard King of England". I know there are cleverer and more authentic versions, but I can't seem to get them past entrenched memories.)

What really bothers me is gratuitous and careless changes which are often just 'messing' with a good song, simply to have one that no one else does. In my collection of Child Ballads, there are some astoundingly atrocious sounds perpetrated by singers or groups who I suppose thought they were 'being creative'. I'll bet YOU have heard some of those.

I learned my version of "The Twa Corbies" from Jean Redpath, 40 years ago, and I really like the feel of the tune she used, and as I said way back up there, the point of the song is always clear to a **folk** audience, even with my non-authentic Scots accent. I suppose if I were a professional, and singing it for a mixed audience, I would either change a few words or explain them before I started.

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 26 Jan 12 - 10:06 AM

And so, the first piece on my new Fiddlesangs project was to revisit my old version of the Twa Corbies as discussed above:

http://soundcloud.com/sedayne-fiddlesangs/the-twa-corbies-auld-fell-dyke

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: Anne Neilson
Date: 26 Jan 12 - 04:30 PM

To offer a little clarification on the matter of the tune most usually sung to 'The Twa Corbies'-

I first learned this ballad in 1957/8 at the Ballads Club in Rutherglen Academy, near Glasgow, which was started by our English teacher Norman Buchan, and we sang it to the Breton tune which had been matched to it by another English teacher Morris Blythman who taught in Glasgow (and who had been Norman's best man...). Both men were certainly familiar with it as a poem, but when Morris heard the Breton tune on holiday, he made an immediate connection.

This is what Norman had to say about it in the notes to the Wee Red Book -- as "101 Scottish Songs" was known amongst the folk community when it was published by Collins in 1962 --

    'This is one of the greatest of all our ballads. But a ballad is only a ballad when it is sung. It            lacked a tune, and I had never heard any successful attempt at providing a setting for it. This tune, an ancient Breton war song, was taught to Morris Blythman by the Breton folk-singer Zaig Montjarret, and he set the Scottish ballad to it. The result is astonishingly right. There is a curious submerged lilt in the tune which exactly sets the mood of the poem, with the jaunty chatter of the crows as against the macabre theme of their talk.'

Norman had used this musical version of the ballad in our second year English class, when I was aged 13, and set us homework to rewrite a modern version with the rhythms of the tune in our head. I wrote a ballad of a meeting between a young man who was pursuing a lassie who was promised elsewhere, but when she tried to refuse him gently, he stabbed first her and then himself, gathering her corpse into his arms for the finale -- "He pit his airms roon that lassie fair oh / An' she was his for evermair oh x2". (Remember, I was only 13, so what did I know of passion or anything else!)

Anyway, Norman published a Scottish traditional song in the Weekly Scotsman newspaper, every week for a year as I recollect -- around 1959/60 -- and included both 'Twa Corbies' and my version (together with other great songs such as 'The Gallowa' Hills', 'The Wark o' the Weavers', 'Coulters Candy', 'Birnie Bouzle', 'Tullochgorum', 'Come a' ye Tramps an' Hawker Lads', 'MacPherson's Rant' etc.). This then became the basis of the later publication of "101".

Anne Neilson.

Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
From: Lighter
Date: 26 Jan 12 - 05:43 PM

Thanks for sharing, EKanne.

Adding the tune was one of those inspirational moments that wind up having a huge impact.