The White Fisher: An Illegitimate Child Ballad from Aberdeenshire- Bishop
[Missing for now are the charts, correlation of stanzas (Appendix) and music, not carefully proofed,
R. Matteson 2015]
The White Fisher: An Illegitimate Child Ballad from Aberdeenshire
by Julia C. Bishop
The James Madison Carpenter Collection was made principally in England and Scotland during the period 1929–35. This vast unpublished field collection contains a large number of ballads and other songs from the North East of Scotland,including some rare texts and tunes. Carpenter’s most prolific singer, Bell Duncan of Lambhill, in the parish of Forgue, Aberdeenshire, provided him with some sixty-five Child ballads alone, including a number of these rare songs. My en-counter with her version of one such ballad, “The White Fisher” (Child 264),prompted the following examination of this little-known and seldom-studied song.
“The White Fisher” has only ever been collected in east Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Francis James Child found no international analogues of the ballad, and his commentary is based on a single text. To date, only five versions are extant, four lengthy ones (one with tune) and one markedly shorter, but not necessarily incomplete, version without a documented tune. In addition, there are two stanzas, with tune, clearly deriving from “The White Fisher” but contained within aversion of “Fair Ellen” (Child 63, “Child Waters”) and another single stanza with tune which has recently come to light. All were documented during a period of just over a hundred years, from the time of Peter Buchan’s collecting in 1816–27 to the early 1930s, when Carpenter collected the ballad (see Appendix A). These bare facts alone raise intriguing questions as to whether the ballad was more widely known within Aberdeenshire and/or beyond but for some rea-son was not encountered by field collectors. If not, how do we account for its limited geographical distribution and relatively short life span in oral tradition?The intrigue of the ballad increases still further when we consider its narra-tive content. The basic plot, as presented in the four long versions, runs as fol-lows: After only a month of marriage, the husband of a couple notices that his wife is pregnant and asks her who the baby’s father is. She names the father(whose identity varies and will be discussed in more detail later) and implies that this man raped her.
Sometime later she bears a baby boy. Her husband returns to her after an absence, either at, or just after, the birth. She instructs him to drown the child in the sea, but instead he takes it to his mother and persuades her to take care of it. Returning to his wife, he finds her lamenting for the boy:
My bonny young son is a white fisher,
An’ he’s ower sune to the sea;
And lang, lang will I think for fish
Or he bring ony tae me. (Mrs. Annie Robb)
The husband then reveals that the child is in good hands and will be well treated.Around this basic framework of an illegitimate birth and the resolution of thedifficulties which it causes, the different versions weave further refinements andsubtle emphases, some of which will be explored here.Gordon Gerould found the ballad “moving,” particularly because he regardedit as quite realistic (1932: 47). The small body of critical commentary is, how-ever, divided about the coherence and importance of its narrative and its authen-ticity as a traditional ballad. Most notably, Child misconstrued the plot and wrotedismissively of its narrative and stylistic detail. In this sense, then, we can view“The White Fisher” as an “illegitimate Child ballad,” that is, both a Child balladabout illegitimacy and a ballad which Child only grudgingly thought had legiti-mate claim to be included in his compendium of genuine popular ballads. Sub-sequent commentators have helped validate the ballad’s coherence and traditionalauthenticity, and some have implicitly or explicitly raised questions about itsmoral outlook, particularly with respect to gender roles and sexual politics.This essay pieces together what is known of the song’s history by identifyingand assembling the extant verbal texts and melodies of “The White Fisher” andpresenting them alongside information regarding the people who sang the songand the circumstances of its documentation. I will also make a preliminary com-parison of the song’s verbal and musical texts to highlight the most salient as-pects of their continuity and change and review collectors’ and scholars’ commentaries. Given that “The White Fisher” concerns rape, illegitimacy, in-fanticide, and adoption, and the effect of these on marital and parental relations, the critics have often addressed the ballad’s sexual politics. As we will see, closerscrutiny of these remarks often reveals implicit biases and assumptions withinthe secondary context of ballad scholarship itself.
1. Verbal Texts of The White Fisher
The verbal texts of the song are discussed here in the chronological order of their collection. It is worth noting beforehand that the four principal versions are represented by remarkably full texts, given the length and complexity of thenarrative, consisting of between eighteen and twenty-five stanzas (see AppendixB). Each contains four scenes:
1.The revelation of the pregnancy as a consequence of rape;
2.The labor, birth, and wife’s instructions to drown the baby;
3.The negotiations between the husband and his mother concerning the care of the baby;
4.The wife’s remorse over the presumed death of the baby and the husband’s revelation that he has resolved the situation by getting his mother to look after the child.
Some scenes are more extended in some versions than in others, and some details come and go or alter, but the basic nature and sequence of events is the same in all the long versions.
The short (four-and-a-half-stanza) version and apparent fragments of one and two stanzas are also consistent in that they start with or are constituted by the stanza(s) containing the white-fisher imagery (see Appendix C). As we will see, this seems to be a particularly arresting and memorable part of the song,suggesting a regional provenance for at least these stanzas and possibly the whole ballad.
a) The Peter Buchan version
The only version of “The White Fisher” known to Child was the one published in Peter Buchan’s Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (1828)and contained in the 1816–27 manuscript on which the book was based. In this text, the wife identifies the father of the child as “a popish priest” who “vowed he would forgive my sins, / If I would him obey.” When the husband takes the child to his mother, however, she initially regards it as confirmation that “that lady was an ill woman, / That ye chose for your bride.” Undeterred, the husband persuades his mother to look after the child by claiming that it is really his, sent to him by “a king’s daughter” over the sea. Returning home, he tries to comfort his lamenting wife with a drink, but she refuses on the grounds that, if he is capable of drowning the child, he is capable of poisoning her. After the child’s true fate has been revealed, he urges her to be “a good woman,” and she grate-fully acknowledges that he, not she, has saved the situation.That the woman has been raped is communicated more overtly in this version than any of the other long versions. The scenario in stanza 4 is explicitly portrayed as an act of blackmail and abuse of power by a trusted, and officially celibate, religious authority figure which elaborates on this twist in the plot, inject an overt element of sectarianism into the song and are possibly the work of Buchan himself. They certainly provide a platform for his uncompromising views. Despite roundly condemning the priest, however, Buchan immediately extenuates his crime by commenting that“it would appear from the indulgence given to the lady by her husband, that he was conscious of the priest’s treachery, and of her own innocence, in as far as she was betrayed (P. Buchan [1828] 1875, 1: 306; emphasis added). The Catholic priest was treacherous, but Buchan is not above the suspicion that a woman may“lead a man on” to commit rape even though there is nothing in the ballad to justify this comment.Child’s aversion to the ballads collected by Buchan and his doubts about their trustworthiness are well known[3] and, in the case of “The White Fisher, ”these lead Child to censure the ballad still further. He writes, “We need nottrouble ourselves much to make these counterfeits reasonable. Those who utterthem rely confidently upon our taking folly and jargon as the marks of genuine-ness. The white fisher is a trumpery fancy; [stanzas] 2, 7, 8, 12 are fripperycommonplaces” (Child 1882–98, 5: 435). It is clear from this thinly disguisedattack on Buchan that Child believed he had inserted a number of well-knownballad formulas into “The White Fisher” and invented the stanzas containing thewhite-fisher imagery entirely. One wonders why Child included it in The Englishand Scottish Popular Ballads at all, given this degree of opprobrium, and stillmore why Child chose to adopt the ballad’s name which contained the offending“trumpery fancy.”
b) The Bell Robertson and Mrs. Annie Robb versions
As with a number of ballads Child found only in Buchan’s books and manuscripts, he might well have modified his view of “The White Fisher” if the two versions collected by Gavin Greig had been available to him. Alexander Keith,who first published these versions, states,It is not often that Child falls into error, but here he has blundered badly if not unaccountably. Mistakes, of the kind which here makes the child Willie’s son, are frequent in traditional balladry, but unless they are supported by the testimony of two or three independent versions, they cannot be taken seriously. In this case Child had only a solitary, unsupported text to go upon. Further, his reading of the two lines quoted above [i.e., the final two lines] is patently untenable. The lines refer to the fate, not the paternity of the child…. Our two versions greatly modify Child’s indictment of the ballad and of Buchan. (Keith 1925: 208) Bell Robertson of New Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire, gave Greig the ballad in 1908, but it is her second, more-complete version from 1912 which Keith printed in Last Leaves (1925). 4
As with many of her songs, "The White Fisher" was "one of mother's songs. I think it had been her mother's."5
Bell Robertson was born in1841, so this would date her version to the 1850s at the earliest, and her mother,Jean Gall, was born in 1804, pushing her version back to around 1815 at theearliest. Her version consists of twenty-three stanzas and, as Keith points out, "follows Buchan's [version] at no great distance" (Keith 1925: 208).
Greig’s other version of “The White Fisher” came from Mrs. Annie Robb(née Davidson), born in Monquhitter (Porter and Campbell 2002: 577). This ver-sion is also printed by Keith in Last Leaves, along with the note that she “lived‘at the foot of Mormond Hill,’ and d[ied] aged 88 about 1911” (1925: 208). Thismakes the earliest possible date for her version around 1833. The text from Mrs.Robb is eighteen stanzas long and was in fact given to Greig in two parts. Keith states that Greig received stanzas 1–12 in 1908 and stanzas 13–18 in 1910, noting that “Mrs. Robb took them to be portions of separate ballads, but Mr. Greig recognized the connection” (Keith 1925: 208). Keith appears to be partially in error here, however, since Greig’s unpublished sixty-four volumes of folk-song words [Gw] contain “the partial text at Gw 10.79–81 [which] ends with stanza 11and the partial text at Gw 55.109–10 [which] begins with stanza 12.”6
Either way,from a narrative angle, these seem odd places for the song to be divided, and one wonders if Mrs. Robb regarded either part as a complete song in itself. Keith’s phrase “portions of separate ballads” rather than “separate ballads” suggests that she saw each of them as incomplete. It is noteworthy, however, that “there is no indication that Greig had any direct contact with her,” and the several texts he received came through her son, Alexander Robb (Lyle 2002: 471).Greig immediately grasped the significance of the texts from Bell Robertson and Mrs. Robb, and he defended the ballad and Peter Buchan against Child’scriticism. In a letter to William Walker (1912), he expresses surprise at Walker’s“harking back to Child’s muddle” regarding the plot, adding, “to me the ballad is perfectly intelligible.” He goes on: “If spared to reach the ‘White Fisher’ I hopeto treat the matter frankly & fully in the interests of simple truth & fair play to the ballad and to Peter Buchan, when I should be sorry to find a good man & friend associated with Child in his hopeless position” (Greig to Walker, 5 August 1912). Greig, alas, did not live to publish his observations on “The White Fisher,” but Keith’s remarks in Last Leaves catch something of Greig’s uncompromising tone. Far from disparaging the ballad as Child had done, Keith comments that“our two versions of this ballad, particularly the first [that of Mrs. Robb], are the most interesting in our collection” (Keith 1925: 207). With the benefit of Greig’s versions for comparison, he takes Child to task for misconstruing the story and condemning the ballad and Buchan. In particular, he counters Child’s attack on the ballad’s language and imagery.
A particularly distinctive element of Mrs. Annie Robb’s version is the absence of any explicit hostility to the wife from the mother. The husband simply persuades his mother to look after the boy and give him the best nursing and education possible. The invented “king’s daughter” is also absent. However, the implication that the boy is his illegitimate child is retained in the injunction, unique to the versions of Mrs. Robb and Bell Duncan (below), which he gives his mother: An’ ye’ll tak’ care, my mother,” he said,“When we come here to dine,That ye’ll kiss my son, and bless my son,But say nae that he’s mine. (stanza 13)Mrs. Robb moves on swiftly from this point, including the lament of the wife but omitting her suspicion that her husband could poison her, and concluding not with her acknowledgment of his saving the situation, nor her blessing him, but with his issuing the parallel admonition to his wife regarding his mother:An’ ye’ll tak’ care, my lady,” he said,“When we go there to dine,That ye’ll kiss your son, and ye’ll bless your son,But say not that he’s thine (stanza 18). Keith highlights these distinctive stanzas of Mrs. Robb’s version, commenting that this is how the husband gets over the difficulty of what Keith terms “his lady’s lapse” (Keith 1925: 208). This suggests either that Keith interprets the initial situation as rough seduction, rather than rape, or regards the woman assome how to blame for being raped and the resulting situation. Greig does not comment explicitly on the morality of the woman’s actions.Rather, in the light of Mrs. Robb’s admonitory stanzas, he focuses on the gallantry of the husband’s behavior. He writes to William Walker that “Willie [is] arare hero; nay,...the greatest hero that I have encountered in all balladry” (Greig to Walker, 5 August 1912). In a later letter, he continues to enthuse to Walker about these stanzas: “Just think of it; and it really needs a bit [of] thinking to take it all in. I have grappled with it, and am free to confess that, viewed from an ethical standpoint, the whole thing impresses one more than does any other situation which I have encountered in ballad study.”7
Thus, Greig rightly broadens the critical focus to consider the actions of the husband as well as the wife— although he does not mention the other key character, the mother—and he underlines the uniqueness of the husband’s actions from the perspective of ballad narrative more generally. Whether or not the husband is “the greatest hero…in all balladry,” the moral outlook(s) implied by “The White Fisher” is certainly tantalizing and worthy of further study.
c) The Miss Annie Robb and Miss Elizabeth Robb stanzas
Miss Annie Robb and Miss Elizabeth Robb were both daughters of Mrs. Annie Robb (Lyle 2002: 471; Porter and Campbell 2002: 578; Campbell 2002). Elizabeth Robb was older, born in 1856, and Miss Annie Robb was born about 1872.As adults they both lived in Strichen (Lyle 2002: 471; Porter and Campbell2002: 578; Campbell 2002). They had a brother named Alexander Robb (1863–1940) of New Deer, who was a prolific contributor to both The Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection and the Carpenter Collection but appears not to have sung“The White Fisher” to either Greig or Carpenter (Porter and Campbell 2002). As can be seen from Appendix C, the stanzas contributed by both Elizabeth and young Annie Robb contain the white-fisher imagery, and are very close to their mother’s parallel stanzas. Both are of particular interest because they were documented with accompanying tunes and therefore provide evidence of the ballad’s melodic tradition, which will be discussed in more detail. It is difficult at this historical distance and on the evidence available to judge how active“The White Fisher” was in the repertoires of Elizabeth and Annie Robb. It seems safe to assume that they both knew what they had of the ballad from their mother,but, as noted already, she herself “knew” it as two distinct songs. Whatever the case, Greig documented a single stanza of text from Miss Annie Robb.Intriguingly, it appears that Elizabeth Robb may have known and sung a fuller version of the ballad since “although no record was made of the tune [by Greig in relation to Mrs. Robb’s version], Arthur Barron [Greig’s son-in-law]mentions in a letter to William Walker of 31 August 1920…that Mrs. Robb’s daughter, Lizzie Robb, had sung this ballad to him the previous evening” (Greig- Duncan Collection 1983, 2: 521). This tune was not documented at the time,however, and the only available evidence of Elizabeth Robb’s knowledge of the ballad comes from the Carpenter Collection, where two stanzas of “The White Fisher” are embedded in a version of “Fair Ellen” (Child 63, “Child Waters”) shesang to Carpenter. The stanzas occur near the end of the ballad at the point where Lord William has gone to the stable to demand that Fair Ellen, whom he has previously dismissed but who has just given birth to his son, open the door to him. She replies that she cannot do so, has her son in her arms, and will be dead before day. Then she laments, in the white-fisher stanzas, that her child has gone away and she will never see him again. This is a unique addition to this ballad as far as the textual record is concerned. The ballad concludes with Lord William breaking down the door and embracing Fair Ellen and the child, as in other versions much in common with Mrs. Robb’s text. It is longer, however, and has a number of distinctive features.In particular, a number of stanzas are unique to Bell Duncan’s version. In stanza 2, for example, the wife replies directly to the husband in what is,
mutatismut and is, a repeat of the first stanza. Stanza 7 is also unique because the husband’s departure until the time of the birth is lengthier and includes a promise of his return. More extended, though not unique to Bell Duncan since it also appears inMrs. Robb’s version as a couplet, is the stanza where the wife laments that if she were bearing her husband’s son, she would not be alone at the birth. The arrival of her husband immediately after this, specifically “ti ease her moan,” is further dramatic proof of his sincerity toward her and the child. It is interesting to com-pare this with the Peter Buchan version (stanzas 6–7) and Bell Robertson vesion (stanzas 7–8), where the husband’s goodwill, toward at least the child, is suggested by the fact that, when he learns that his wife has gone into labor, he comes home “merrily” and “singing.”Bell Duncan seems in a number of details to lay particular stress on the husband’s compassionate attitude toward his wife and the illegitimate child. The text transcription, for example, indicates that stanzas 1–3, 6 and 7, which form part of the husband-wife dialogue regarding the rape and pregnancy, are sung to a melody where the final line is extended with the words “dear love,” leading to a repeat of the final line:
’Tis a month an’ ’tis nae mair,
My dear, since I married thee,
An’ there is a baby atween thy sides,
An I’m sure an it’s nae tee me, dear love,
An’ I’m sure an’ it’s nae tee me. (stanza 1)
Indeed, the husband only ever refers to his wife as “my dear,” “my dear love,”and (in one instance) “my lily flooer,” whereas other versions include variations,such as the more-impersonal “my lady” and “my gay lady.” Once the child hasbeen born, this tenderness is immediately extended to the boy, who is describedas “his bonnie young son” (stanza 10). In the other versions, it is not until thenext scene (the dialogue with the mother) that he calls the boy his son. Thus, BellDuncan’s version provides a particularly dramatic foil for the wife’s ensuinginstructions for her husband to drown the child since it places in even sharperrelief her total conviction that, despite an indication to the contrary (he came home when he promised to), he is hostile to the child and therefore to her. BellDuncan’s version also intensifies the imagery of fatherly love toward the child inthe third scene; he is not just “rowed...in his sleeve”/“ta’en up”/“rowd in a band”but “clasped...tee his breist.”As in Mrs. Robb’s and Bell Robertson’s versions, the rapist is a servant of the wife’s father, this time the “kitchie boy.” The reference to rape is wordedsimilarly to Mrs. Robb’s version—“he laid his han’ on my shoulder, / An’ hecaused me bak to fa’”—making it, like Mrs. Robb’s, more ambiguous than theother extant texts. Despite this and other marked resemblances to Mrs. Robb’sversion, however, Bell Duncan’s differs from it in including, as in the other longversions, the mother’s suspicion of the wife and the wife’s worry that her hus-band could poison her.
2. Musical Texts of "The White Fisher"
Written in 1972, in his fourth and final volume of The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, Bertrand Bronson’s entry for “The White Fisher” noted, “Greigfailed to recover a tune for the ballad, and none has yet been printed. James M.Carpenter, however, in the twenties collected one in Scotland which he may intime disclose” (Bronson 1959–72, 4: 71). Since then, it has come to light thatGreig did collect a tune for the ballad and there are in fact two distinct tunes inthe Carpenter Collection, which is now accessible due to its purchase by theArchive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.Research by the editors of The Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection (1981–2002) has led to the recent discovery thatGreig made a preliminary attempt to note the tune under the title“White Fisher” at Argo 5.6 [a notebook] and noted it fully under thetitle “Lady Marrit” at Argo 5.10, giving a verse of “The WhiteFisher” opposite it at Argo 5.11. The tune was copied withoutwords into Gm [Greig’s volumes of “Folk-Music”] under the title“Lady Marrit” and has previously been misidentified as a version of Child 74…and was given earlier in this edition [of The Greig- Duncan Folk-Song Collection] as 337 “William and Margaret” B. 10
This refers to the single stanza of text and tune provided by Miss Annie Robb(Fig. 2, overleaf):
[missing chart]
Fig. 2. Miss Annie Robb, “William and Margaret”/“Lady Marritt”/“The White Fisher” (
TheGreig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection, 2: no. 337).
Porter and Campbell (2002) have noted the tonal ambiguity of the melody:
A phrase that seems solidly pentatonic (based on G with a minor third above and flat leading note) concludes its second phrase onthe C a fourth above. This gives the impression of both parallelismand circularity in the pentatonic conception, with a first phrase tonalstructure FGBy CD and a second phrase DFGBy C, where theunderlined note is the cadential point. (578)
There is also some uncertainty as to how Miss Annie Robb’s text fits the tune asnotated if the fourth note in the second complete bar is read as crossed out.Carpenter recorded and transcribed several renditions of Elizabeth Robb’smelody for “Fair Ellen,” including one stanza entitled “Fair Ellen/The WhiteFisher” which specifically includes a stanza of the white-fisher:
Fig. 3. Miss Elizabeth Robb, “Fair Ellen/The White Fisher” (transposed down one tone).Courtesy of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archive of Folk Culture, AmericanFolklife Center, Library of Congress (AFC 1972/001, p. 08208).
The passing note at the end of the second complete bar, not present in Greig’snotation from Miss Annie Robb, accommodates all the syllables of the text.Otherwise the first half of Elizabeth Robb’s tune is very similar to her sister’s
[photo missing]
Fig. 5. Miss Bell Dun c a n , “ T h e W h i t e F i s h e r . ” C o u r t e s y o f t h
which each phrase cadences (B and E respectively) tends to occur on the pri-mary stressed beats/syllables throughout the preceding part of the phrase. Asnoted already, the final line of the text is often extended by the addition of thewords “dear love,” followed by the repetition of the final line. Bell Duncan easilyaccomplished this within the tune by repeating the final three bars, starting fromthe second beat (modified to a single D) of the sixth complete bar. It is notablethat in the two renditions transcribed by Carpenter, stanza 3 (“‘O is’t till a laird, ois’t till a lord’”) occurs both with and without the repetition of the final line.Likewise the verbal text which Carpenter took down from Bell Duncan’s dictation(see Appendix B) contains the repetition of the final line in stanzas 1, 2, 3, 6, and7, whereas this only occurs in stanza 3 in the verbal text of the music whichCarpenter transcribed from his cylinder recordings.13
These facts suggest fairlyunequivocally that repeating the last line of a stanza was a flexible practice in BellDuncan’s renditions of the ballad, although it does seem to have been confinedto stanzas in the first scene.
Conclusion
The comparison of the verbal texts of “The White Fisher” has highlighted thedifferences between them, but it should be reiterated that the extant “long” textsare remarkably similar despite the ballad’s narrative complexity. All retain thefour basic scenes, although, as is evident from Appendix B, the length of eachscene in number of stanzas varies. Thus, Mrs. Robb’s version is evenly propor-tioned throughout; Bell Duncan’s stresses scenes 1 and 4, which center on thehusband-wife dialogues; Peter Buchan’s version emphasizes scene 4, where theproblems presented in the ballad are resolved; and Bell Robertson highlightsscene 2, the labor, birth and instructions to kill the child.In textual details, we have seen that the versions of Peter Buchan and BellRobertson are similar, as are those of Mrs. Robb and Bell Duncan. In musicalterms, however, the extant tunes from the Robbs and Bell Duncan are quitedifferent.Even with all the known evidence before us, it is not possible to do more thansuggest possible reasons why the ballad had such a limited geographical distri-bution and life span in tradition. The length of the ballad and its complicated plotmay well have been a factor although this raises the question of why the balladwas apparently not abbreviated and simplified by one or more singers who en-countered it. Perhaps the ballad’s moral outlook did not resonate sufficientlywith singers (who, according to the evidence, were all female apart from PeterBuchan’s source, whose sex is unknown) and/or their audiences in the North East of Scotland or beyond. Certainly, the imagery of the child as a white fisherand the stylized portrayal of “shall never” which grows out of it in the phrase “tillfite fish he fess hame” (and its variants) may have had a regional currency whichlimited its circulation beyond this area (although the phrase “white fish” is more widespread) (Oxford English Dictionary; Shields 1983). It also suggests a re-gional provenance for the ballad. If so, perhaps distinct social conditions in thisregion during this period prompted and supported the limited distribution of theballad.Another question raised by textual analysis is the degree to which Peter Buchan’s published text may have influenced the ballad’s circulation, the perpetuation of its complex narrative, and its language. In this connection, it is notable that the small amount of tune evidence for the ballad reveals two distinct melodies compatible with, though not necessarily indicative of, print distribution of the text.Child’s principal objections to “The White Fisher” stemmed from the fact that the story, as he read it, did not form a coherent narrative and the ballad had been subject to the textual meddling of Peter Buchan, especially in the “trumpery fancy” of the white-fisher metaphor, and was therefore of doubtful authenticity.However, we have seen that the ballad does form a coherent narrative, even in Peter Buchan’s version, although the story is an unorthodox and complex one.The white-fisher stanzas are certainly unique to the ballad, at least as far as the Child corpus is concerned, but are probably indicative of the ballad’s origins in,or at least closeness to, the culture of the Scottish North East, rather than Peter Buchan’s invention. After countering Child’s objections, it seems that “The White Fisher” may qualify as a legitimate member of the Child corpus after all.More importantly from the standpoint of contemporary scholarship, its in many ways unorthodox representations of rape, illegitimate birth, infanticide, adoption, and marriage, when considered in the context of the real social conditions inthe North East of Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, make“The White Fisher” a legitimate and suggestive focus for further study.
Appendix A: Extant versions and fragments of "The White Fisher."
Buchan, Peter.
Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland. 2 vols. 1828. Reprint,Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1875. Vol. 1, 1950-99 (see Appendix B). Words only.Duncan, Bell. AFC 1972/001, pp. 05919-22 (words), 07755-57 (words, see Appendix B],08731-32 (music with words, see Fig. 5). The James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archiveof Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Duncan, Mrs. William. AFC 1972/001, pp. 05923 (words), 07758 (words, see Appendix B). The James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Words only.Robb, Mrs. Annie. Keith 1925: 208-9. Reprinted in vol. 2 of The Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection, 42-43 (see in Appendix B). Words only.Robb, Miss Annie. "William and Margaret"/"Lady Marritt"/'The White Fisher."
The Greig- Duncan Folk-Song Collection, vol. 2, no. 337. Reprinted in vol. 8 of The Greig- Duncan Folk-Song Collection, 348 (see Fig. 2 and the words only in Appendix C).Words and music.Robb, Miss Elizabeth. "Fair Ellen"/"The White Fisher." AFC 1972/001, pp. 04836-38 (words),06924-25 (words, reproduced in Appendix B), 08208 (music with words, see Fig. 3), 11518(music, see Fig. 4). The James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archive of Folk Culture,American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Words and music.Robb, Miss Elizabeth. "Fair Annie (White Fisher)." AFC 1972/001, p. 11519 (music with words). The James Madison Carpenter Collection, Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Words and music.Robertson, Bell. Keith 1925: 209-10. Reprinted in vol. 2 of
The Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection, 41-42 (see Appendix B). Words only
[Missing 4 pages correlation of stanzas (Appendix)]
Notes
This article has benefited from the help and advice of a number of colleagues, especially Robert Thomson, Emily Lyle, Katherine Campbell, David Atkinson, Sigrid Rieuwerts, and the staff at the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. I am most grateful to them for their time, interest, and insights.
1.For further information on Carpenter and Bell Duncan, see Bishop 1998a, 1998b, 2003.
2. Defining rape historically is difficult (Porter 1986) and, as Mitchison and Lenemanwarn, seduction could be rough without being termed rape (1989: 194–95). Considerationis given here to the specific ways in which rape appears to be suggested, implicitly orexplicitly, in the ballad versions. That the ballad reports no dialogue or preceding encounterbetween the woman and the kitchie/butler boy, however, strengthens the impressionthat, as far as the text is concerned, this was a sudden and forceful attack, whosemotivation had no pretensions to courtship and seduction of any kind. Singers, of course, may have had other interpretations.
3.See Rieuwerts in this volume; also D. Buchan 1972.
4.See the editorial notes to “The White Fisher” (version A, The Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection 1983, 2: 521), and Greig’s letter of 29 July 1912 (Greig 1907–14). I amindebted to Special Collections: Rare Books, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, for permission to quote from this and other letters in that collection.
5.Quoted in the editorial notes to “The White Fisher” (version A, The Greig-DuncanFolk-Song Collection 1983, 2: 521.
6.Noted in “Supplementary Notes to Songs in Volumes 1–7,” The Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection 2002, 8: 426.
7.Letter to William Walker, 17 Feburary 1913 (Greig 1907–14).
8.I take this to refer to Elizabeth Robb’s grandmother, Mrs. Robb’s mother.
9.Alexander Robb, “Fair Ellen” (version A, “Lord William and Lady Margaret”; TheGreig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection
1995, 6: 429); “Fair Ellen,” sung by Alex Robb,Carpenter Collection: 04834–35 (text), 06918–19 (text), 08205 (music notation), and 08206 (music notation).
10.“Supplementary Notes” (The Greig-Duncan Folk-Song Collection 2002, 8: 426–27).
11.The title “Fair Annie” is probably a slip by Carpenter for “Fair Ellen” since the verbaltexts of “Fair Annie” (Child 62) noted from Elizabeth Robb by Carpenter have nostanzas in common with “The White Fisher.” Elizabeth Robb’s melody for “Fair Annie”is nevertheless almost identical to “Fair Ellen”/“The White Fisher.”
12.It is clear from Carpenter’s notes on this page that Alex Robb used this alternative tunefor a number of ballads, including “Fair Annie” (Child 62), “The Kitchie Boy” (Child252), “Young Akin” (Child 41, “Hind Etin”) and “Edom o’ Gordon” (Child 178).
13.For more on Carpenter’s collecting methods, see Bishop 1998a: 407–08.
References
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Folk Music Journal 7,no. 4: 402–20.———. 1998b. “The Tunes of the English and Scottish Ballads in the James MadisonCarpenter Collection.”
Folk Music Journal 7, no. 4: 450–70.———. Forthcoming.“Bell Duncan: ‘The greatest ballad singer of all time?’” Paper presented at the Folksong: Tradition and Revival Conference, University of Sheffield,July 1998 (to be included among a selection of revised papers from the conference edited by Ian Russell and David Atkinson, forthcoming 2003). Bronson, Bertrand Harris. 1959–72.
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Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads and Ballad Airs Collected in Aberdeenshire by the Late Gavin Greig
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