Bonny Banks of the Airdrie- Emery (ME) 1927 Barry
[Fragment from British Ballads from Maine; by Barry, Eckstorm, Smyth 1929. This is the first printed version from North America, a one stanza fragment.
Following are Barry and all's notes.
R. Matteson 2014]
BABYLON
(child 14)
From Mrs. Robert Emery, born in Scotland, a resident of Eastport for the last twenty-six years. Recorded October, 1927.
"What is this that I have done?
Killed my sisters all but one,
On the bonnie bonny banks
Of the Airdrie O.
This interesting fragment, the first known record of the ballad in America, belongs with Child F (III, 500) and Gavin Greig's fragment (Last Leaves, pp. 15, 25L). Miss Bell Robertson, New Pitsligo, from whom Greig received the fragment, said she learned it from a tinker boy. "They used to camp beside my mother's house, and the children came to beg, and my brothers, who were boys at the time, used to ask them to sing." (Last Leaves, p. 251.) Child F was first printed in 1880, by Francis H. Groome (In Gypsg Tents, pp. f43-145), with the comment: "from Sinfi (the English wife of Willy Faa) this Scottish ballad, which she had learned of Jocky Neilson's wife." The common feature of Maine A, Greig's fragment, and Child F, is the name "Airdrie," instead of "Fordie," found in Child A, the version published by Motherwell (Minstrelsy, p. 88). As Child F has been transmitted by
gypsies, and Greig's fragment by tinkers, it seems likely that both together with Maine A, belong to a distinct form of the ballad, preserved through the singing of gypsies or tinkers,-- nomads of similar mode of life, and often confounded by the uninitiate.
An excellent text, "Down by the Bonny Banks o' Airdrie, O," with the melody, from Kingarth, is in the Miscellanea of the Rymour Club (Edinburgh), II, 77 -79.