The ballads o Anna Gordon Brown

At some time before 1783 Robert Eden Scott had written down around 20 ballads from Anna’s singing. It was through mention of his daughter’s repertoire to associate William Tytler, a noted Scottish advocate and historian, that Thomas Gordon was motivated to have more ballads recorded for Tytler’s scrutiny. Fifteen ballads were thereafter written down from Anna’s singin, with Robert giving musical notations for the melodies.

In 1800 Anna wrote down a further nine ballads in her own hand, this time without musical notation. It is these two original manuscripts containing a total of 24 ballads that are held on long-term deposit at the National Library of Scotland. Both are prefaced by contemporary letters which explain the origins of the ballads. The Library  also holds copies of the two volumes of Robert Jamieson’s ‘Popular nallads and songs’ which include five ballads from Anna Gordon Brown’s repertoire. The library also holds a copy of ‘The ballad repertoire of Anna Gordon, Mrs Brown of Falkland’ edited by Sigrid Rieuwerts and published by the Scottish Texts Society in 2011. This publication gives excellent insight into the whole Anna Gordon corpus.

The ballad repertoire of Anna Gordon Brown, notwithstanding that it has occasionally divided scholarly opinion on questions of origin and interpretation, was commended by world folklorist Francis James Child of Harvard University, editor of the definitive ‘The English and Scottish popular ballads’ (1882-1898). In Child’s own words:

‘There are no ballads superior to those sung by Mrs Brown of Falkland in the last century.’

Ballads are ancient survivors of the oral Scottish tradition and are believed to have sprung from a yet older tradition of epic poetry and storytelling. They most likely rose to popularity in the medieval period and have counterparts throughout Britain and Europe. In its most basic form a ballad is a story told in song where a protagonist relates the scenes of a tale in a direct and unaffected manner. Well known Scottish ballads are ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, ‘The Dowie Dens of Yarrow’ and ‘the Wife of Usher’s Well’. A ballad in its truest sense will be an anonymous work rooted in these traditions. It will normally be sung unaccompanied, rather than be a recent folk or contemporary song with known authorship.

The  Medieval ballad is variously said to have its origins through the repertoire of travelling minstrels, in the songs of monks during leisure hours or among the common populace or at the workplace. Scottish ballads were sustained up until modern times by the traditions of the travelling gypsies known as ‘tinkers’ or ‘tinklers’’.

The advent of print would popularise ballads through illustrated broadsides, often re-printed in in variant or mixed versions. They would become further popularised through printed books with the editorship of such as Robert Jamieson, Thomas Percy, Walter Scott, James Hogg, David Herd, William Motherwell and James Francis Child – featuring in publications such as Percy’s ‘The reliques of ancient English poetry’, Scott’s ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’, Motherwell’s ‘The Harp of Renfrewshire’ and James Johnson’s ‘Scots musical museum’.

Printed ballads were in some ways problematic in that the sentiment was possibly compromised due to the absence of music and aural experience. An editor might also be tempted to add a verse or change a line to ‘improve’ a ballad for dramatic purposes or metrical sense, inadvertently removing the essence of the piece in the process. As seen in Professor Thomas Gordon’s letter to Alexander Tytler of 19 January 1793, he appears to be in no doubt as to the provenance and authenticity of his daughter’s ballad repertoire:

‘An aunt of my children (Mrs Farquherson now dead) who was married to the proprietor of a small estate near the sources of the Dee in Braemar, a good old woman who spent the best part of her working life among flocks and herds resided in her later days in the town of Aberdeen. Being maternally fond of my children, when young she had them much about her and delighted them with her songs & tales of chivalry. My youngest daughter Mrs Brown of Falkland is blessed with a memory as good as her aunt and has almost the whole store of her songs by heart.’

What might may be debatable is how faithfully a ballad was retained between the singer’s rendition and transition to page – and whether from a linguistic point of view certain words might have been assimilated to a more standardised English. There appear to be occasions where a line might have been altered to accommodate an Anglicised form of spelling. For example in the version of ‘Burd Ellen’ in Jamieson’s ‘Popular ballads and songs’:

‘O, tell me this now, my good lord John,
In pity tell to me,*
How far it is to your lodgin,
Whare we this night maun be?’

*Here Jamieson notes that this line replaces the original ‘And a word you dinna lie’, but it is conjectured that in order to be consistent in rhyme,  the original line is more likely to have  been in the Scots: ‘And a word you dinna lee‘.

There are also variations in spellings such as ‘mother’ and ‘mither’, ‘yellow’ and ‘yallow’.

The surviving Anna Gordon Brown ballad collection is classified into five manuscripts, known as Brown A, B, C, D or E.

Brown A consists of 20 ballads originally written down by Robert Eden Scott some time before 1783, and was copied out in the hand of Robert Jamieson in 1799. This manuscript is held in the David Laing Collection in the University of Edinburgh Library.

Brown B consists of 15 ballads written down by the hand of Robert Eden Scott in 1783, giving musical notations to the melodies.

Brown C consists of nine ballads written in Anna Gordon Brown’s hand in 1800 and does not include musical notation.

Brown D is a collection of four letters to Robert Jamieson dated 1800-1805 and includes three ballads written down by the hand of Andrew Brown.

Brown E is a printed source and contains five ballads which appear in Robert Jamieson’s 1806 ‘Popular ballads and songs’, Volumes 1 and 2.

It is the bound manuscripts known as ‘Brown B’ and ‘Brown C’ which are held in long-term deposit at the National Library, with contents as follows:

Brown B

1. Willie’s Lady
2. Clark Colven
3. Brown Adam
4. Little Jack the Scot
5. Chil’ Brenton
6. The Grey Goshawk
7. Young Bekie
8. Rose the Red and White Lily
9. Brown Robin
10. Willie o’ Douglas Dale
11. Kempion
12. Lady Elspat
13. King Henry
14. Lady Maisery
15. Her Cruel Sister

Brown C

1. Thomas the Rhymer & Queen of Elfland
2. Love Gregor
3. Fa’se Footrage
4. Jellon Grame and Lillie Flower.
5. The Bonny Earl of Livingstone
6. Bonnie Bee’hom
7. Bonnie Foot-boy
8. Cruel Brother, or the Bride’s Testament
9. Lord John & Burd Ellen

With respect to ‘Brown E’, the Library holds the 2 volumes of Robert Jamieson’s ‘Popular ballads and songs’ which include the following from the Anna Gordon Brown repertoire.

Volume 1

.    Burd Ellen – p. 113
.    Willie & May Margaret – p.135
.    Hugh of Lincoln – p. 139
.     Lamikin – p. 176

Volume 2

.    The Birth of Robin Hood – p.44

In ‘The ballad repertoire of Anna Gordon, Mrs Brown of Falkland’,  Sigrid Rieuwerts gives an account as to how the Brown B an Brown C manuscripts, eventually coming under custodianship of the Fraser-Tytler family at Aldourie Castle on south Loch Ness, became lost for part of the 19th and 20th  centuries. Around 1927 the Brown C manuscript wis discovered by Mrs Christian Fraser-Tytler in a safe in the wine-cellar at Aldourie Castle. Some time in the 1930s she discovered  Brown B  on an upper shelf of the library, as she later recalled, ‘bound in with a lot of pamphlets an papers’.

Anna Gordon Brown’s ballads are abundant in mystery and violence. In ‘Willie’s Lady’ a vengeful mother resolves to kill her son’s bride and unborn child through her powers of witchcraft. In the end it is Willie who, on the counsel of his Lady, uses the black arts to turn the situation in their favour:

‘Ye do ye to the market place,
And there ye buy a loaf o wax,
You shape it, bairn & bairnly like,
An in twa glassen een you pit…’

Willy finally undoes the witchcraft by loosening ‘the nine witch knots/that was amo’ his lady’s locks.’

In ‘Clark Colven’ the protagonist pledges loyalty to his lover but is seduced by a mermaid in a river. When he suffers terrible head pains the mermaid enchants him by saying he will find a cure by cutting a strip from her sleeve and wrapping it around his head. This has fatal consequences as she transforms once again to a fish and takes to the stream while Clark Colven slips towards death:

‘O mither, mither mak my bed,
An gentle Lady lay me down;
O brither, brither unbend my bow,
Twill never be bent by me again.’

In ‘Brown Adam’ a false knight attempts to seduce Brown Adam’s lover by luring her with riches:

‘Out he has tae’n a purse o goud,
Was a’ fu to the string
“Grant me but love for love, Lady,
An a’ this shall be thine”.’

When she refuses his riches he finally threatens her with death at which Brown Adam arrives and cuts four fingers from the right hand of the false knight.

In the ‘Brown C’ manuscript Mrs Brown offers an introduction to ‘Thomas the Rhymer & Queen of Elfland’, a ballad also known as ‘Tam Lin’ or ‘Tamlane’:

‘The tradition concerning this ballad is that Thomas Rhymer when young, was carried away by the Queen of Elfland or Fairlyland; who retained him in her service for seven years, during which period he is supposed to have acquired that wisdom which afterwards made him so famous.’

Here she refers to Thomas the Rhymer or Thomas of Ercildoune, a 13th century real-life character reputedly having the gift of prophecy. An account of Thomas appears in Hector Boece’s 1527 Latin ‘Chronicles of Scotland’, subsequently translated into Scots by John Bellenden and published in 1536.  ‘Tam Lin’ in its various forms has been published among others by Robert Burns and Walter Scott. It was referenced in 1549 polemic ‘The Complaynt of Scotland’ which drew on the strengths of Scotland’s traditions. A version of ‘Tam Lin’ appears in Duncan Williamson’s ‘A thorn in the King’s foot; Stories of the Scottish Travelling People’(1987).

Retained over centuries through the traditions of Scotland’s travelling people, the ballad tradition underwent an unexpected revival in the post-war years, when folklorists such as Hamish Henderson and Alan Lomax resolved to record for posterity that which had prevailed of Scotland’s oral traditions. In Suzanne Gilbert’s article ‘Scottish ballads and popular culture’, published in the Association of Scottish Literary Studies ezine ‘The Bottle Imp’ Issue 5 May 2009, she writes,

‘The most influential collector, Hamish Henderson (1919-2002), camped out in the Perthshire berry fields, tapping into a rich stream of traditional ballads preserved among the travelling families of Perthshire and Fife – singers such as Jeannie Robertson, Belle Stewart, and Betsy Whyte, who became internationally renowned. Recording the songs for Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies, which he co-founded, Henderson reported that it “was like holding a bucket under Niagra Falls”.’

The ballad tradition would inspire the 1950s and 60s folk music revivals, through singers such as Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, Jean Redpath and The Watersons. It continues to inspire traditional musicians in the present day, in the songs and music of such as the Battlefield Band, Karine Polwart, and Old Blind Dogs.

Versions of ‘Tam Lin’ have been recorded by many folk artists including Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span. ‘The Ballad of Tam Lin’ or ‘The Devil’s Widow’, a contemporary re-telling of the ancient Scottish ballad, is a 1970 horror film directed by Roddy McDowall and starring Ava Gardner and Ian McShane.