| Author | Topic: Add: I'll Mount the Air on Swallow's Wings | |
| See Also: The Loyal Lover | ||
| dmcg | Posted - 16 Feb 04 - 10:34 am | |
I'll mount the air on swallow's wings To find my dearest dear. And if I lose my labour And cannot find him there. I quickly will become a fish To search the roaring sea; I love my love because I know My lover he loves me. Source: A Dorset Book of Folk Songs, EFDSS, 1958 Notes: Collected from Mrs Crawford, West Milton by the Hammonds. Database entry is here. | ||
| Malcolm Douglas |
Posted - 16 Feb 04 - 01:38 pm | |
Roud 578. This is a vestigial form of the song Baring-Gould published as The Loyal Lover (Songs of the West, 1905, no. 91), two verses of which, he noted, appeared in Colin and Phoebe's Garland (British Museum 11,621, c 5). It appears to be The Maid in Bedlam, in fact, stripped of its (limited) narrative component, and Roud categorises the two together. What presumably is the garland text referred to is printed in the Journal of the Folk Song Society, II, (7) 1905, 93, with a tune noted in Cornwall from a singer who had forgotten the words. The song appeared on broadsides and in songsters from around the 1770s onward. Two broadside examples can be seen at Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads: The Maid in [of] Bedlam One of those indicates the tune Gramachree, and the song appears in Johnson, Scots Musical Museum, I, 1787, 46-47, set to that tune (later known as The Minstrel Boy). Lucy Broadwood noted in the Journal: "Johnson's version called The Maid in Bedlam is said to have been written by George Syron, a negro. Giordani (circa 1770) composed yet another, and uninteresting, tune to practically the same words." | ||