I’ve started listening to another Audible book, but it’ll take a while for me to finish it. To take a break from listening, I sidled over to the piano and played a one-eyed rendition of my favourite song.
Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament (Baloo, my Boy)
My Song Gems (Scots), edited by James Wood and Learmont Drysdale (London: Vincent Music Co., 1908), is a nice big score that sits comfortably on the piano stand. This song is arranged by Finlay Dun, a Victorian arranger. As I squinted at the words, they didn’t look like what I remembered hearing sung from Cedric Thorpe Davie and George McVicar’s The Oxford Scottish Song Book (1969). What was going on? I suspected Davie and McVicar had taken their words from George Farquhar Graham and James Wood’s mid-Victorian Songs of Scotland. ‘You’ll see’, I told my bemused son. ‘The words will have been too smutty for Victorian ears, so Graham and Wood changed them.’
Davie used their words – which were perfectly acceptable for a collection intended both for classroom and adult use – but his musical setting is updated.
A Deserted Mother and Child
Graham and Wood’s collection revealed in the footnotes that it was an old ballad collected by Bishop Percy. However, Graham said that …
The Old Ballad, though poetically meritorious, is so coarse in most of its stanzas as to be repugnant to modern feelings of propriety. We have, therefore, adopted only the first stanza of it, the additional stanzas here given having been written by a friend of the Publisher.
Songs of Scotland (Edinburgh: Wood & Co., 1850), Vol.2, pp.30-31
Percy’s original version is in the National Library of Scotland’s Digital Gallery (Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 1767). Today, the lyrics are inoffensive!
And here’s the Cedric Thorpe Davie setting using Graham and Wood’s sanitized words:-
The Song Gems (Scots) version is in modern English and the text has been partially rewritten again – it falls halfway between the original and the sanitized words! And the musical arrangement? Straight from Graham and Wood’s collection.
Percy, verse 3: Smile not as thy father did, to cozen maids, nay God forbid / Bot yett I feire, thou wilt gae neire Thy fatheris hart, and face to beire.
Wood and Drysdale, verse 2: Smile not as thy father did, to cozen maids, may God forbid / For in thine eye his look I see, The tempting look that ruin’d me …
Olde English or modern, take your pick!
As for Graham and Wood, or Thorpe and McVicar? Not a ruinous smile to be be seen! The lady may have been deserted, but no hint that she had first been seduced!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 