Susannes
Folksong-Notizen
[1857:] In Percy's version of Barbara Allen, that ballad commences "In Scarlet town," which, in the [later] common stall copies, is rendered "In Redding town." The former is apparently a pun upon the old orthography - REDding. (Robert Bell, Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England)
[1859:] It has been suggested that for "Scarlet" town... we should read "Carlisle" town. Some of the later printed copies have "Reading" town. (Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time) - [1951:] An old English ballad sung to a
traditional tune. (Penguin Song Book 106)
[1956:]
From the evidence, it frequently appears that the
element of narrative suspense means next to
nothing to these singers. There may in fact be
something radically inimical to suspense in the
lyrical conception of balladry itself. [...]
Barbara Allan, which leads all the rest in
popularity, seems at any rate never to have
possessed this ingredient. Barbara's belated
remorse may perhaps provide a modicum of
surprise. But in almost none of the current
variants does her lover put up so much resistance
as to offer a word of explanation of the apparent
affront with which she sometimes charges him.
More often than not, her charge of neglect is
also dropped, and her callousness left
unexplained. To judge by the briefer variants,
the elements with most power of survival in the
song, after the seasonal setting in the opening,
are the summons to the death-bed, Barbara's
languid compliance with it, and the upspringing
and intertwining of the symbolic plants from the
graves. When, as sometimes happens, the
connection between Barbara's death and her desire
to atone for her cruelty fails to be made,
obviously little remains of genuine narrative.
[Its] popularity from the days of Pepys onward to
the present, in the face of its undistinguished
and unexciting content, its portrayal of
unresisting surrender to untoward fortune, is, if
we take the song as a fundamental expression of
the spirit of the English-speaking people, a
phenomenon so strange and mysterious as to
deserve prolonged meditation. (Bronson, Ballad
162f)
We may ask if there are any obvious features that
might help to explain why these particular songs
have clung to memory. In the first place, all are
motivated by passionate love, though the emotion
itself is not the focus of interest. [...] In the
second place, these stories are very easily
remembered [...]. But the ballads are songs, not
merely spoken narratives; and it remains to
inquire very briefly whether the tunes can throw
any further light on the question at issue.
(Bronson, Ballad 167ff) -
[1961:] Probably it is the most widespread old
world ballad in the U.S. - of course, everyone
knows a different version and swears it is
"the real one". (Seeger, Ballads 79 -
close to T 33) -
[1962:] "Scarlet Town", which is not
to be found on any map, and which may even be an
inspired corruption of a known locality, has
stood firm in the popular imagination. Reading
(town), for which it might once have been a
punning substitute, has not been taken up, nor
has London, though they both occur sporadically.
[...] Two contrasting seasons for the central
event have made strong claims to permanent
acceptance: autumn and spring. Autumn [...] was
the choice of the first surviving Scottish
version, of the early eighteenth century. [...]
the opposite choice has been greatly preferred,
perhaps because it sharpens the pathos, the
poignancy, of the death of young lovers. [...]
Analysts suggest that the reason most suicides
occur in fine weather [???] is because of the
clash between that and the private unhappiness.
The lover's name has never been felt to matter
[...]. But Allan in some form has clung through
thick and thin, being built into rhymes and
echoed in the melodic cadences. Better rhyming
has sometimes prompted "Ellen", and
thereupon the first name may become an epithet,
"barbarous". But that word is rather
too literary, and Barbara has generally held her
ground. The reproachful death bells have seldom
been forgotten, even in regions where one may
suppose bells to be rare [...]. To make a good
ending, Barbara's remorse and death used, as the
earlier texts indicate, to be judged sufficient.
But not latterly: familiar formulas from other
songs have suggested themselves, and the
conclusion is drawn out at length. Barbara orders
her mother to make her bed, her father to dig her
grave; if Jimmy dies as it might be today, she
dies as it might be tomorrow, of love in the one
case, in the other of sorrow. They are buried in
churchyard and choir, respectively, and the old
favourite rose-and-briar ending, symbolic or, as
some say, metempsychotic, is appended.
Frequently, the metaphor fades, and the briar
springs from Willie, the rose from Barbara. [...]
A fact that seems to have escaped attention is
the very interesting metamorphosis which has
befallen Barbara herself in her lifetime. [...]
The first known reference to the song's existence
is in Pepys's diary, January 2, 1666 [...]. How
much older the song may be we cannot surely say,
but the frequent mention of old songs, like
Greensleeves, in earlier literature makes the
lack of a single casual Elizabethan allusion to
Barbara an argument for a mid-seventeenth-century
origin. Pepys calls it a Scottish song. [Allow it
time for coming south from Scotland!]
It has even been wildly conjectured that the song
was a covert attack on Barbara Villiers, Countess
of Castlemaine. We have no Scottish texts so
early;; no recorded tune in Scotland for another
century, in England for two centuries. But an
English broadside text was printed in London in
Pepys's own day, and its most salient features -
with powerful assistance from Percy's 'Reliques',
a work continually reprinted after 1765 - have
been perpetuated in the traditional memory.
Barbara Allan's Cruelty, it was called, and
unexplained cruelty was her chief characteristic
trait. It has been a main business of tradition
to rationalize this quality and explain it away.
In the broadside, when the young man's servant
comes to summon her, [she is cold]. So stony a
heart was too much for the popular sensibility,
which went to work on motivation. In the earliest
Scottish copy, printed about fifty years later,
in Ramsay's 'Tea Table Miscellany', and also
reprinted by Percy, she is not cold but bitterly
resentful. [...] In the Scottish copy, he has no
reply, but turns his face to the wall with a kind
adieu. She leaves the deathbed with visible
reluctance and a parting sigh, and goes home to
announce her imminent death. Not so the early
broadside. Walking "on a day", Barbara
hears the death bell, turns round to see the
funeral procession, orders the corpse to be set
down, and takes a long look, all the while loudly
laughing. Again the popular mind has recoiled,
and in copy after American copy, we find verses
like these:
The more she looked, the more she grieved
She busted out to crying
I might have saved this young man's life
And kept him from hard dying
Sometimes self-reproach changes even to
self-exculpation:
Oh mother dear, you caused all this
You would not let me have him
Thus, little by little, and partly through mere
abridgment and condensation, a kindlier, more
sympathetic image has been wrought in tradition.
If Barbara was once a "real person", as
Phillips Barry believed that she must have been,
she has certainly mellowed with age!
Barbara Allan is unquestionably and by all odds
the best known, most favourite traditional ballad
among English-speaking peoples in the twentieth,
and like enough the nineteenth, century. [...] By
ordinary standards, one must acknowledge that the
story has few of the elements that make a smash
hit. The action is far from violent; there is
little suspense in it, and a minimum of surprise.
[...] There is no love triangle, no defiance of
conventional morality, no struggle, no
complication, no delay. [...]
But [...] the idea of love as a destructive power
has been a potent concept for almost as long as
the Western civilization can be traced. By the
ancients it was looked upon as a seizure, a
calamity, a madness; and the lover's madness was
a disease also well known to the Middle Ages. In
all early literature, as in the best loved
ballads, love is an illness from which few or
none recover [???]. Because of it, Barbara's
lover is doomed. [...] But what she does not as
yet realize is that the disease is infectious.
After her rash exposure, her death is almost
equally predictable, and imminent. [...] The
ideal of a love so complete and entire as to be
essential to the continuance of life is a
conceptual archetype persisting through the ages,
through all literature, the greatest - and the
least. [...]
Barbara Allan is an extremely memorable song. It
is next to impossible to get the narrative
twisted. There are but two characters, [the
tunes] act as we should expect them to do, and
require no extra will-to-remember. [...]
When someone asks, why all this fuss and bother,
this endless trouble and expenditure of time on
an old song, the answer is: because this old
song, in its mere, sheer commonness, strikes to
our very roots. (Bronson, Ballad 236ff) -
[1967:] Only a small proportion of ballads are
firmly localized. [...] Sundry versions of
Barbara Allen give the young lady's
dwelling-place at Scarlet town, London town,
Quelick town (wherever that may be), as Reading,
Newbury, Newry, Dublin, and as far afield as
Lexington, Virginia, no doubt with a view to
making the ballad interesting in whatever
locality it is sung. (Lloyd, England 141) -
[1977:] It is perhaps one of the most popular
of the traditional ballads in America. It
probably owes much of its popularity to its
proliferation in print; in England and in
Scotland it appeared constantly on broadsheets in
the 1700s and 1800s.
It has always seemed strange to me, as a woman
singer, that Barbara should be branded
"hard-hearted" simply because she did
not reciprocate a man's love. In the earlier
(mostly Scots) texts, however, Barbara was
characterised as a spiteful, pretty girl who
returned a small slight with a large one, who
"with scornful eye" looked down upon
the corpse - "her cheek with laughter
swellin'." The ballad goes back to the late
1600s and it is a favourite pastime of many
folklorists to tie its events into the life of
Charles II, whose last mistress Barbara Villiers
(hated by all but her royal lover) is often
thought to be the anti-heroine of the ballad. The
fact that earlier texts portray Barbara as
malicious may lend veracity to this theory, but
time and tradition, however, have certainly made
her - and the ballad - more romantic and
soft-hearted. (Notes Peggy Seeger, 'Cold Snap') -
[1980:] The plot is unconvincing, but the
ballad has held a place in men's affections for
more than three hundred years. During that time,
the feelings of Samuel Pepys and Oliver Goldsmith
have been much quoted and widely shared. Pepys
heard the actress, Mrs. Knipp: 'In perfect
pleasure I was to hear her sing, and especially
her little Scotch song, Barbary Allen.' (1666)
Goldsmith heard a humbler singer: 'The music of
the finest singer is dissonance to what I felt
when an old dairymaid sung me into tears with
Johnny Armstrong's Last Goodnight, or The Cruelty
of Barbara Allen.' (1765) (Palmer, Ballads 83) -
[1989:] Think of the Jacobite songs [...] Who
sings them now? Or who realizes that a song that
has survived, Barbara Allen, was originally a
political satire? (Ewan MacColl in Denselow,
Music 20) -
[1992:] I began to look at ballads like [this
one] with fresh eyes, becoming more aware that
the events in those songs were still going on:
people did get murdered out of jealousy; people
were still oppressed for trying to break out of
old systems and ways of thought; people were
still dying because of the loss of love in their
lives. (Armstrong, Eye 69) -
[1992:] Samuel Pepys in his "Diary"
under the date of January 2nd 1665, speaks of the
singing of "Barbara Allen." The English
and Scottish both claim the original ballad in
different versions, and both versions were
brought over to the US by the earliest settlers.
Since then there have been countless variations
(some 98 are found in Virginia alone). (Anon, UWP
Archive, www.leo.org/)
[2001:] This version was collected in Liddledale by Frank Kidson from the grand-daughter of Tibby Shiels, Sir Walter Scott's informant, and its first verse clearly sets the events in the Borders, the Graemes being a noted family in the Debatable Lands to the north of Carlisle. I heard Ewan MacColl sing it once and was very taken by it. I eventually found it in a collection owned by my friend Laurie Charlton. (Notes Louis Killen, 'The Rose in June')
http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=17738
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Susannes
Folksong-Notizen English Notes 
