Mary Hamilton- Peel/Chandler(VA) 1922 Davis A, B, AA
[Version A and B from Traditional Ballads of Virginia, Davis, 1929- also version AA, a complete version, from More TBVa, 1960 Davis. Some notes from 1929 and all the notes from 1960 appear below.
This is from Peel's grandmother Chandler, then, curiously, additional verses are from her uncle in 1924. Apparently TBVa was complete and at the publisher in 1924 otherwise Davis would have added this complete version.
Davis was unaware that the West Virginia version was taken from an unreliable source (Carey Woofter) and therefore is likely a ballad recreation from print. I question the legitimacy of the additional stanzas from Peel even though they are documented. Davis has a habit of including questionable rare versions and providing general documentation without really trying to debunk them (see Smith versions in More TBVa). Davis has no statement from the Chandlers (Peel's uncle or aunt), there are no letters with texts between Peel and the Chandlers and Davis didn't bother to corroborate the stanzas with their testimony only relying on the informant's testimony- Peel obviously wanted to find more stanzas so she could complete the ballad. In that regard, she would have written her Aunt and Uncle about 1922. Why is her own family (mother's side) is not mentioned? Although the aunt sang the ballad with Peel, she did not know the additional stanzas- they came from her husband. It's more likely the aunt was taught the ballad by Peel.
Davis does not mention Texas Gladden's 1941 version which she learned from Peel. Gladden also learned Child No. 1 from Peel and Peel provided a new opening verse of "Riddles Widely" in 1932 with no source (and didn't provide the source to Davis) which apparently is from print.
R. Mateson 2015]
Peel writes, "The following is a fragment sung to me by my grandmother when I was little. The melody is lovely. Her family came from western England and she said her father sang her this ballad. . . . My grandmother's family all fought with the Stuarts, so this fragment is probably very old." The melody which is attached to A applies to B as well and is indeed very lovely, even when sung with the Virginia "mountain whine" which Miss Peel can reproduce so perfectly. See Bulletin, No. 10, p. 7, where this find was first announced; Combs, p.141 (West Virginia).
A. "Mary Hamilton." Collected by Miss Alfreda M. Peel. Sung by Mrs. Marion Chandler, of Salem, Va., Roanoke County, May 14, 1922. With music.
1 "Little did my mother think,
When first she cradled me,
That I should die so far from home,
So far o'er the salt, salt sea."
2 "Last night there were four Maries,
Tonight there'll be but three;
There was Mary Seaton, Mary Beaton,
And Mary Carmichael and me.
3 "Last night I washed Queen Mary's feet
And carried her to her bed;
Today she'll give me my reward,
The gallows hard to tread.
4 "They'll tie a napkin 'round my eyes,
They'll ne'er let me see to die;
They'll ne'er let on to my father and mother
That I'm far away over the sea.
B. " Mary Hamilton." Collected by Miss Alfreda M' Peel. Sung by Mrs. Marion Chandler, of Salem, Va. Roanoke County April 23, 1922. With music.
1 "Oh, little did my mother think
When first she cradled me,
That I should die so far from home,
Far over the salt, salt sea.
2 "They'll tie a napkin over my eyes,
They'll ne'er let me see to die;
They'll ne'er let on to my father and mother
That I'm far over the sea.
3 "Last night there were four Maries,
Tonight there'll be but three;
There was Mary Seaton, and Mary Beaton,
And Mary Carmichael and me.''
_______________________________________________
Notes from Davis; More TBVa, 1960
MARY HAMILTON
(Child, No. 173)
In place of the final lyrical lament of Mary Hamilton, plus tune, of TBVa, a full text and tune are now available from phonographic recording, plus two additional fragments.
Child overran the alphabet from A to BB in printing twenty-eight texts or partial texts of the ballad from all the recognized Scottish sources-Sharpe, Motherwell, Scott, Buchan, Burns, Kinloch, and the rest, including nine unpublished texts from Scott's Abbotsford materials for his Minstrelsy. A single tune going back to the eighteenth century, in Child's "Ballad Airs from Manuscript" (V, 421 ), represented the only musical record of the ballad to that date (1898), except the 1884 air from the Perthshire highlands printed by Colin Brown in The Thistle, mentioned by Greig-Keith, p.109.
Since the time of Child, no English text or tune seems to have appeared from tradition-understandably, since the ballad is essentially Scottish-but, surprisingly enough, only two fragmentary texts and two tunes have been recovered by Greig and Keith from Scottish sources (pp. 107-9).
In America, the garner has been only slightly better. Until the present publication, only one full text from tradition has been printed, by J. H. Combs in Folk-Songs du Midi des Etats-Unis (1925), pp. 141-43, from West Virginia. Barry finds no text from Maine, but with characteristic inclusiveness reaches across the border to New Brunswick for a fragmentary "secondary tradition" of the piece (pp. 258-64). (He also prints as his version B a Scottish fragment, and as his version C a single stanza of a poem by a Maine poet into which a stanza of "Mary Hamilton" has entered.) TBVa (pp. 421-22) mustered only two slightly varying fragments (from the same singer), plus tune. Randolph (p. 151) has only a less-than-two-stanza fragment from Missouri, no tune. And there the traditional record of the ballad in America seems to end. The appearance of the ballad in various song collections, such as J. P. McCaskey's Franklin square Song Collection, (New York, 1887) and Thomas A. Becket, Jr.'s scotch songs (Boston : Oliver Ditson; Philadelphia: The W. F. Shaw Co., 1888), both listed by Coffin, must be set down to reprinting from other sources, as must also the text and tune in Reed Smith and Hilton Rufty's American Anthology of Old World Ballads (New York, 1937), pp. 42-43, which are reprinted, with permission and with acknowledgment, from TBVa (with some additions from an unidentified source).
The present fuller text and tune, from the son, daughter, and granddaughter of the Mrs. Chandler from whom the earlier Virginia version came, is especially welcome. Miss Peel has recorded that after she had taken down from her grandmother, who was then very old, the fragments of TBVa and sent them to the Archivist, her own memory of the song was refreshed by hearing it sung by her uncle, St. Lawrence Chandler, then of Chicago, Ill., when he was visiting in Virginia about 1924. The present editor, who took down the words and made the recording on August 9, 1932, is a witness to the familiarity also of Miss Peel's aunt, Miss Letha Chandler, of Salem, Va., with the words and tune of the song, to which she made some contribution. Though the recording was made by Miss Peel, the song had just previously been sung by Miss Chandler and Miss Peel, earlier (around 1924) by the uncle, Mr. Chandler, and earlier still by the grandmother, Mrs. Marion Chandler, who brought the song with her from Bristol, England. Mrs. Chandler learned the song from her father. We have here a direct family tradition of the ballad reaching back far into the nineteenth century and to the Old Country. Mrs. Chandler seems to have been of Scottish descent, since Miss Peel's letter (quoted in TBVa, pp. 421-22) records, "My grandmother's family all fought with the Stuarts."
In addition to the longer grandmaternal text and tune, Miss Peel is responsible for the recovery of two one-stanza fragments: a "little did my mother think" stanza from Amherst County, and a "four Marys" stanza from Roanoke County mentioning Mary Livingstone, one of the historic Marys of the Scottish court. Both are printed, as traces of this rare ballad in Virginia.
The historicity of the ballad presents some curious problems, and is still a matter of dispute. On its face, the ballad would seem to deal with an incident at the court of Mary Queen of Scots, in which Mary Hamilton. one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, is accused of murdering her newborn babe, perhaps fathered by Darnley, the Queen's husband. She is arraigned by the Queen and duly executed, after she has told her piteous story and made her lament. Scholars, including Child, have been troubled by the fact that there was no historical Mary Hamilton attendant on Queen Mary, that there was no recorded case of child-murder involving any of the real four Marys (Fleming, Livingston, Seton, and Beaton) and that the ballad itself was not known until Robert Burns in 1790 dropped a stanza of it into a personal letter and Walter Scott collected many versions of it from Scottish tradition and printed eight of them in his Minstrelsy in 1802. Scott himself thought that the ballad dealt with an incident recorded by John Knox concerning a French woman that served in the Queen's chamber and the Queen's own apothecary, both of whom were subsequently hanged in Edinburgh. In 1824 C. K. Sharpe first called attention to the remarkable parallel of a case of child-murder and execution involving a real Mary Hamilton (or Hambleton), a Scottish lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine at the court of Czar Peter the Great in Russia in 1718-19. Child, with less than his usual caution, at least for a time, gave his assent to the Russian story as the basis of the ballad, which he therefore attributes to the eighteenth century (III, 382-84), and his recantation, if it is a recantation (V, 298-99), is by no means clear-cut, nor does he present any satisfactory explanation of the ballad's history. In fairness it should be noted, however, that Child did not live to see through the press his final volume in which his later notes on the subject appear.
Child's recantation, if it is one, is the result of an article by Andrew Lang, "The Mystery of 'The Queen's Marie," in Blackwood's Magazine for September, 1895, pp. 381-90, in which he attacks Child's preference for the Russian origin and argues strongly for the ballad's Scottish origin and greater age than post 1718-19.- Albert H. Tolman, in an article on "Mary Hamilton; The Group Authorship of Ballads," in PMLA, XLII (June, 1927), 422-32, finds the dilemma of Scotch or Russian origin fallacious, and concludes soundly but rather cautiously, "Some versions are plainly a mixture of elements derived from both sources."
In the light of all the known facts, and in view of the known ways of ballads in oral tradition, the following seems the most likely account of the origin and life-history of "Mary Hamilton." The ballad is of sixteenth-century Scottish birth and originated, as Scott thought, in the French serving woman and Queen's apothecary incident at the court of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1563. one of the versions not known to Child when he wrote his original headnote,but printed in a later volume (IV, 509-10), has a stanza identifying the man as an apothecary (Child U 13) :
'My love he is a Pottinger,
Mony drink he gae me,
And a' to put back that bonnie babe!
But alas ! it wad na do.'
It is significant that this version comes from the materials of Sir Walter Scott, who first put forward the apothecary incident as the ballad's origin, with substantiating quotations from John Knox. Since Darnley did not come to Scotland until 1565, the beginnings of the ballad can scarcely have concerned him. But given his known habit of philandering even with the Queen's attendants and John Knox's bitter denunciation of the morals of the court and of the Maries, specifically Mary Livingston (Child, III, 582), it is easy to see how the ballad might have moved to the higher levels of the court, to substitute a lady-in-waiting and "the highest Stuart of all," or Darnley, for the French woman and the apothecary. John Knox testifies that there were such ballads at the time: o''What bruit the Maries and the rest of the dancers of the court had, the ballads of that age did witness, which we for modesty's sake omit" (quoted by Child from Knox's History of the Reformation, ibid, footnote).
From this time until the early eighteenth century, we lose sight of the ballad, but no doubt it was known and sung in Scotland. What the name of the original "heroine" was, we do not know, but then comes the parallel incident at the Russian court involving a Scottish lady-in-waiting actually named Mary Hamilton, who was supposed to have had an intrigue not only with her officer but with the Czar, and who is tried and condemned to die. That the existing Scotch ballad should not have been influenced by this notorious parallel is almost unthinkable, and it is possible that the name of Mary Hamilton attached itself to the existing ballad at this time. The condemned woman's address to the sailors and reference to her dying in a foreign land also point to the influence of the Russian story. But a still more conclusive argument for the impact of the Russian story on the existing tradition is that, from long obscurity, the ballad emerged into the great eighteenth-century popularity that resulted in the collection of so many variants by Scott and others by the end of the century. A clinching argument for the greater antiquity of the ballad is that no ballad of comparable duality has been known to originate in the eighteenth century. The concluding sentence of child's headnote reads, "It is remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the best." It is not one of the latest. It was, however, colored by the recent Russian affair, and the two traditions became intermingled and confused as the ballad became more popular in eighteenth-century Scotland. Even if documentary proof is lacking at certain points, the inferences seem to square with the present state of our knowledge of the ballad and of ballads in general.
After so large a venture in historical reconstruction, it is interesting to note that Professor Friedman's recent viking Book of Ballads (p. 183) classifies "Mary Hamilton" not among historical ballads but under the head of "Tabloid crime.', yet that settles nothing.
Of the two more or less complete American texts of the ballad, the Combs text from west Virginia and the present Virginia text, both are closer to Child A than to any other child text. Indeed, the thirteen-stanza West Virginia text is very close to the eighteen-stanza Child A. The correspondence of its thirteen stanzas to the stanzas of Child A, in order, is as follows: 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, first half of 11 (last half = Child E 13), 12, 14, 15, 16, 17. The only significant variations (apart from omissions of stanzas 2, 6, half of 11, 13, and 18) are the presence of the lines:
Seek never grace of a graceless face,
For that you will never see
found in Child E 13 and other texts, but not in Child A, and the omission of the final "Last night there were four Maries" stanza. The relationship of the Virginia text to child A is far more complicated by reason of the dislocation of stanzas and, telescoping of parts of different stanzas. There is no mention of "the hichest Stuart of a' " in the first stanza, nor of the bad omen, "The heel cam aff her shee," of stanza 9, and the following stanzas are entirely missing: 2, 5, 11, 16. Parts of other stanzas are omitted or freely telescoped without loss of sense. The lines of the lament, present in the Virginia text, but not in Child A,
"They'll tie a napkin 'round my eyes
And ne'er let me see to dee"
are found only in the final Child fragment BB. The repetition of the "four Maries" stanza, without increment, as stanza 9 and as the final stanza,is unknown to Child A or to any other Child variant. On the whole, verbally and otherwise, the Virginia text shows the operation of oral tradition more clearly than the West Virginia text. compare the two lyrical fragments of TBVa, from the same source.
AA. "Mary Hamilton." Phonograph record (aluminum) made by A. K' Davis, Jr. Sung by Miss Alfreda M. Peel, of Salem, Va., from her recollection of the singing of her grandmother, Mrs. Marion chandler, of Bristol, England, and Salem, Va. Miss Peel's memory of the song was refreshed by hearing it sung by her uncle, St. Lawrence chandler, of Chicago, Ill., when he was visiting Virginia about 1924. Roanoke county. August 9, 1932; Text transcribed by M. J. Brucoli. Tune noted by E. C. Mead. On the same date when this recording was made,A. K.Davis, Jr., transcribed the text from the singing of Miss Peel and her aunt, Miss Letha Chandler, of Salem, Va.; this text differs only very slightly from that taken from the record. (Cf. TBVa, PP. 428, 590.)
1 Word has come from the kitchen,
And word has come to me,
That Mary Hamilton's slain her babe
And thrown him in the sea.
2 Down came the old Queen,
Gold tassels in her hair,
"O Mary Hamilton, where's your babe?
I heard it greet so sair.
3 "Mary put on your robes of black,
Or yet your robes of brown,
That you can go with me today
To see fair Edinburgh town."
4 She put on[1] her robe of black,
Nor yet her robe of brown,
But she put on her robe so white
To see fair Edinburgh town.
g When she went up the Canno' gate,
The Canno' gate so free,
Many a lady looked o'er her casement
And wept for this ladye.
6 When she went up the Parliament stair
A loud, loud laugh laughed she.
But when she came down the Parliament stair,
A tear was in her ee.
7 "O, bring to me the red, red wine,
The best you bring to me,
That I may drink to the jolly bold sailors
That brought me o'er the sea.
8 "Little did my mother think,
When first she cradled me,
That I should die so far from home,
So far o'er the salt, salt sea.
9 "Last night there were four Maries,
Tonight there'll be but three;
There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton
And Mary Carmichael and me.
10 "Last night I washed the old queen's feet,
And carried her to her bed;
Today she gave me my reward,
The gallows hard to tread.
11 "They'll tie a napkin 'round my eyes
And ne'er let me see to dee;
They'll ne'er let on to my father and mother
That I'm far away o'er the sea.
12 "Last night there were four Maries,
Tonight there'll be but three;
There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton
And Mary Carmichael and me."
1 MS. has "put not on," which the sense demands.