'Lord Randal' in America- Shearin 1919
[Shearin's tile is apparently a take off on Carrington's 1881 article (and essay 1886) titled, Lord Ronald In Italy. Of his four version he prints just one. Shearin and Combs published A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Song in 1911. Shearin does not mention the version listed in A Syllabus.
R. Matteson 2014]
'Lord Randal' in America
by Hubert G. Shearin
The Modern Language Review, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Apr., 1919), pp. 211-214
'LORD RANDAL' IN AMERICA.
The Irish version of this ballad, published by Mr Joseph J. MacSweeney, in the July, 1918, issue of the Modern Language Review, pages 325-327, incites me to submit four American analogues.
The first is current among the inhabitants of the Cumberland Mountain region of Kentucky. These people are of pure English stock, and for over a century have been able through their topographical aloofness from modern influences, social, literary, and educational, to preserve intact much of their inherited lore of the Mother Country. Among them songs abound of queens and kings and castles, of knights in armour and of ladies on milk-whites teeds, whose lily-white hands hold bridle reins hung with bells, who alight before ancestral halls in the North Countree or Edinboro or Nottingham or London-town. Other ballads picture gold-seekers afloat upon the Spanish Main, Thames boatmen, London apprentices, thieves transported for their crimes, and lovers returning from the French wars.
A score or more are close variants of Old World originals recorded by Child in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads. All have apparently been borne westward across the Atlantic on the tide of eighteenth century Colonial migration to America, where for almost two hundred years they have been wafted like thistle-down on the light breath of oral tradition, changeless and unchanging. In them British proper names of persons and places are faithfully preserved, as well as ancient customs, manners, and habits of thought and speech. Linguistic and syntactical archaisms are frequent, such as old adverbial genitives in -(e)s, 'one' and 'some' as indefinite articles, 'all' used as adverb, old strong-verb forms, including the preterite in -en and 'were' with singular subject.
Their vocabulary and phraseology, too, are antique, furnishing such locutions as 'dinna',' 'riddle my sport,' 'a month and a day,' 'come her wi',' ' bailiff,' 'squire,' 'post-town,' 'shillings,' 'pounds,' 'guineas,' 'cordelee' (corde-de-laine), 'wellaway'; 'list' for stripe, as used in 1629 by Sidney in his Arcadia; the Chaucerian 'maintainance,' for behaviour; 'fancy' for love, as in Dryden's Rival Ladies; 'to roll a song,' to sing it lustily, as used by Southey; 'to play,' to wrestle, a Shakespearean meaning; 'fee,' a wife's dowry, an old law term; 'denter,' for denture, or denshire, or downshire, meaning level turf-land; and many other such. The present-day Kentucky minstrel's attitude toward these archaisms is one of charming naivete.
Some time ago a grey-bearded old fiddler was singing for me the 'Bailiff's Daughter of Islington.' ' What does that word Bailiff mean?' I asked. 'Oh, shucks,' came his prompt reply, ' that's just in the song.' Rarely will he tamper with his text! How- ever, one of my singers, in reciting from 'Lord Randal,' Mother, make my bed soon; I am weary wi' hunting and fain would lie down, could not brook the, to him meaningless,' fain'; so he sang 'and pains me lie down'; while yet another minstrel phrased it 'I faint and lie down.' But such folk-etymologizing is not common: 'It's just in the song '-that is all we know on earth, and all we need to know. In close keeping with all this conservative and conserving spirit stands the Cumberland Mountain version of' Lord Randal.' Coming from Knott County, in the sequestered eastern portion of the State, it exemplifies well the power of a ballad to resist environment, to persist in its original form, unchanged by topical surroundings. It runs:
'Where have you been rambling?', it's Randal, my son; '
Where have you been rambling, my pretty and sweet one?'
'I've been a-courting; mother, fix my bed soon;
I am sick at my stomach and fain would lie down.'
'What did you eat for your supper?', it's Randal, my son;
'What did you eat for your supper, my pretty and sweet one?'
'Fried eels (eggs) and fresh butter; mother, fix my bed soon;
I am sick at my stomach and fain would lie down.'
'What do you will to your brother, Lord Randal, my son;
What do you will to your brother, my pretty and sweet one ?'
'A fine horse and saddle; mother, fix my bed soon;
I am sick at my stomach and fain would lie down.'
'What do you will to your sister, Lord Randal, my son;
What do you will to your sister, my pretty and sweet one?'
'A fine chest of money; mother, fix my bed soon;
I am sick at my stomach and fain would lie down.'
'What do you will to your mother, Lord Randal, my son;
What do you will to your mother, my pretty and sweet one?'
'My house and my land; mother, fix my bed soon;
I am sick at my stomach and fain would lie down.'
'What do you will to your father, Lord Randal, my son;
What do you will to your father, my pretty and sweet one?'
'A dead son to bury; mother, fix my bed soon;
I am sick at my stomach and fain would lie down.'
'What do you will to your sweetheart, Lord Randal, my son;
What do you will to your sweetheart, my pretty and sweet one ?'
'A rope and a gallows; mother, fix my bed soon;
I am sick at my stomach and fain would lie down.
The three remaining variants I will not take the space to reproduce. However, each illustrates, not a resisting of topical environment, but a yielding to it. For example, my second version, from Ballard and McCracken counties, in the more sophisticated western part of Kentucky, about two hundred miles distant from Knott County, shows the intrusion of modern and local influences. 'Lord Randal' here becomes 'Jimmie Randal'; 'mother' is the outrageous 'ma'; he wills his father a 'house and plantation' and his brother a 'gun and hounds'; while to his sweet- heart his climactic bequest is 'ten thousand green-briars to weigh her soul down'-for be it understood that in Western Kentucky the 'green- briar' is the agriculturalist's greatest pest, a veritable 'thorn in the flesh,' as well as in the fields.
A third and much garbled version I have rescued from the arid plains of Texas, carried thence, no doubt, by migrants from the older State. Metre in this song is made anew, and the whole phraseology is its own. But, in spite of all this, the story remains unchanged, even to the fatal 'eel broth'-think of it: eels on the sand plains of Texas ! My fourth and last variant is from New York City-as sung by some little Jewish girls from the Rivington Street Settlement. Here the hero- victim is not 'Lord Randal,' but 'Henry'; who is poisoned not by his sweetheart but by his sister. And the lethal dish is no longer bucolic 'eels,' or 'eggs'; but, as befits its metropolitan setting, it becomes 'green and yellow butter '-mayhap oleomargarine; who can tell?
HUBERT G. SHEARIN.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.