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62-433: " Mary Hamilton ", or " The Fower Maries " ("The Four Marys"), is a common name for a well-known sixteenth-century ballad from Scotland based on an apparently fictional incident about a lady-in-waiting to a Queen of Scotland. It is Child Ballad 173 and Roud 79. In all versions of the song, Mary Hamilton is a personal attendant to the Queen of Scots, but precisely which queen is not specified. She becomes pregnant by

124-439: A baby. In many versions of the song, the queen is called "the auld Queen". This would normally indicate a Queen Dowager or Queen Mother, but in this context suggests a queen consort who was an older woman, and married to a king of comparable age. If the reference is limited to Queens named Mary, another candidate would be Mary of Guelders (1434–1463), queen to James II, King of Scots . The story may have been transferred from

186-432: A commentary on his work it is uncertain exactly how and why he differentiated the 305 ballads printed that would be published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads . There have been many different and contradictory attempts to classify traditional ballads by theme, but commonly identified types are the religious, supernatural, tragic, love ballads, historic, legendary and humorous. The traditional form and content of

248-602: A further 400 have been identified as originating in America, including among the best known, ' The Ballad of Davy Crockett ' and ' Jesse James '. They became an increasing area of interest for scholars in the 19th century and most were recorded or catalogued by George Malcolm Laws , although some have since been found to have British origins and additional songs have since been collected. They are usually considered closest in form to British broadside ballads and in terms of style are largely indistinguishable, however, they demonstrate

310-422: A more pastoral form, like Isaac Bickerstaffe's Love in a Village (1763) and Shield's Rosina (1781), using more original music that imitated, rather than reproduced, existing ballads. Although the form declined in popularity towards the end of the 18th century its influence can be seen in light operas like that of Gilbert and Sullivan's early works like The Sorcerer as well as in the modern musical. In

372-484: A particular concern with occupations, journalistic style and often lack the ribaldry of British broadside ballads. The blues ballad has been seen as a fusion of Anglo-American and Afro-American styles of music from the 19th century. Blues ballads tend to deal with active protagonists, often anti-heroes, resisting adversity and authority, but frequently lacking a strong narrative and emphasizing character instead. They were often accompanied by banjo and guitar which followed

434-850: A product of the development of cheap print in the 16th century. They were generally printed on one side of a medium to large sheet of poor quality paper. In the first half of the 17th century, they were printed in black-letter or gothic type and included multiple, eye-catching illustrations, a popular tune title, as well as an alluring poem. By the 18th century, they were printed in white letter or roman type and often without much decoration (as well as tune title). These later sheets could include many individual songs, which would be cut apart and sold individually as "slip songs." Alternatively, they might be folded to make small cheap books or "chapbooks" which often drew on ballad stories. They were produced in huge numbers, with over 400,000 being sold in England annually by

496-636: A real life source for the ballad in any of its current forms as these are in conflict with the historical record. She and the Four Maries lived in France from 1547 to 1560, where Mary was dauphine and then queen as the wife of King Francis II . Mary later returned home to Scotland (keeping the French spelling of her surname, Stuart). She married her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley in July 1565, and he

558-486: A stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter . Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables. This can be seen in this stanza from " Lord Thomas and Fair Annet ": The horse | fair Ann | et rode | up on | He amb | led like |

620-527: A version in 1972. Jean Ritchie and her sister Edna were filmed in their hometown of Viper, Kentucky performing a rendition passed down through their family. Many versions have also been found in Canada, including several recorded by Helen Creighton in Nova Scotia , New Brunswick and Ontario . In her highly influential text A Room of One's Own , author Virginia Woolf alludes to the characters in

682-608: A wholly different context. It has been noted that it most closely matches, rather than any event in Scotland, the legend of Maria Danilova Gamentova , daughter of an expatriate branch of the Clan Hamilton established in Russia by Thomas Hamilton during the reign of Tsar Ivan IV (1547–1584). A lady in waiting to Tsarina Catherine, second wife of Tsar Peter I "The Great" (who later succeeded him as Catherine I ), Mary Hamilton

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744-498: Is often dramatized as a narrative of degeneration away from the pure 'folk memory' or 'immemorial tradition'. In the introduction to Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) the romantic poet and historical novelist Walter Scott argued a need to 'remove obvious corruptions' in order to attempt to restore a supposed original. For Scott, the process of multiple recitations 'incurs the risk of impertinent interpolations from

806-462: The 1891 Australian shearers' strike , class conflicts between the landless working class and the squatters (landowners), and outlaws such as Ned Kelly , as well as love interests and more modern fare such as trucking . The most famous bush ballad is " Waltzing Matilda ", which has been called "the unofficial national anthem of Australia". Sentimental ballads, sometimes called "tear-jerkers" or "drawing-room ballads" owing to their popularity with

868-731: The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress where it has been made accessible (and searchable). It is considered "a major collection of traditional song and drama, plus some items of traditional instrumental music, dance, custom, narrative and children's folklore, from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the US, documented in the period 1927-55." [1] In 2003, the James Madison Carpenter Collection Online Catalogue,

930-483: The Roxburghe Ballads collected by Robert Harley , (1661–1724), which paralleled the work in Scotland by Walter Scott and Robert Burns . Inspired by his reading as a teenager of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy , Scott began collecting ballads while he attended Edinburgh University in the 1790s. He published his research from 1802 to 1803 in a three-volume work, Minstrelsy of

992-799: The University of Mississippi , and the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Harvard in 1929. He is best known for his substantial work collecting folk songs in England , Scotland and Wales . He recorded well-known singers and musicians that other folklorists had documented, as well as some never recorded before or since such as Bell Duncan , whose repertoire (according to Carpenter) consisted of some 300 songs, including 65 Child ballads . His collection methods included Dictaphone recordings as well as transcriptions of lyrics. Carpenter's method of collecting songs often involved recording several verses using

1054-808: The University of Sheffield , and the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, were jointly awarded the Brenda McCallum Prize of the American Folklore Society for their work on the Carpenter Collection. In 2018, the fully digitised James Madison Carpenter Collection was made available online on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library ’s digital archive. For a more extensive biography see "'Dr Carpenter from

1116-560: The wind |, With sil | ver he | was shod | be fore , With burn | ing gold | be hind |. There is considerable variation on this pattern in almost every respect, including length, number of lines and rhyming scheme, making the strict definition of a ballad extremely difficult. In southern and eastern Europe, and in countries that derive their tradition from them, ballad structure differs significantly, like Spanish romanceros , which are octosyllabic and use consonance rather than rhyme. Ballads usually are heavily influenced by

1178-542: The 1660s. Tessa Watt estimates the number of copies sold may have been in the millions. Many were sold by travelling chapmen in city streets or at fairs. The subject matter varied from what has been defined as the traditional ballad, although many traditional ballads were printed as broadsides. Among the topics were love, marriage, religion, drinking-songs, legends, and early journalism, which included disasters, political events and signs, wonders and prodigies. Literary or lyrical ballads grew out of an increasing interest in

1240-508: The 18th century ballad operas developed as a form of English stage entertainment , partly in opposition to the Italian domination of the London operatic scene. It consisted of racy and often satirical spoken (English) dialogue, interspersed with songs that are deliberately kept very short to minimize disruptions to the flow of the story. Rather than the more aristocratic themes and music of

1302-408: The 20th century, one of the most influential plays, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's (1928) The Threepenny Opera was a reworking of The Beggar's Opera , setting a similar story with the same characters, and containing much of the same satirical bite, but only using one tune from the original. The term ballad opera has also been used to describe musicals using folk music, such as The Martins and

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1364-591: The Ancient Mariner . Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats were attracted to the simple and natural style of these folk ballads and tried to imitate it. At the same time in Germany Goethe cooperated with Schiller on a series of ballads, some of which were later set to music by Schubert . Later important examples of the poetic form included Rudyard Kipling's " Barrack-Room Ballads " (1892–6) and Oscar Wilde 's The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897). In

1426-663: The Coys in 1944, and Peter Bellamy's The Transports in 1977. The satiric elements of ballad opera can be seen in some modern musicals such as Chicago and Cabaret . Some 300 ballads sung in North America have been identified as having origins in Scottish traditional or broadside ballads. Examples include ' The Streets of Laredo ', which was found in Great Britain and Ireland as 'The Unfortunate Rake'; however,

1488-495: The Dictaphone cylinder machine, then asking the singer to start again and dictate the words of the song, two lines at a time, while he typed them up on a portable typewriter. Carpenter returned to Harvard in 1935 where he gave occasional lectures and worked on transcribing the tunes of the ballads he had collected, intending to put the material into publishable form. From 1938 to 1943 he taught part-time at Duke University in

1550-531: The English Department. In 1943 he took another post in Virginia and finally moved to the English Department at Greensboro College , North Carolina, where he stayed until his retirement in 1954. He returned to Booneville in 1964 and remained there until his death in 1983. In the end, only a handful of items from his collection were ever published. His extensive material eventually found a home at

1612-510: The Italian opera, the ballad operas were set to the music of popular folk songs and dealt with lower-class characters. Subject matter involved the lower, often criminal, orders, and typically showed a suspension (or inversion) of the high moral values of the Italian opera of the period. The first, most important and successful was The Beggar's Opera of 1728, with a libretto by John Gay and music arranged by John Christopher Pepusch , both of whom probably influenced by Parisian vaudeville and

1674-613: The Middle Ages, there are many variations of each. The ballads remained an oral tradition until the increased interest in folk songs in the 18th century led collectors such as Bishop Thomas Percy (1729–1811) to publish volumes of popular ballads. In all traditions most ballads are narrative in nature, with a self-contained story, often concise, and rely on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic. Themes concerning rural labourers and their sexuality are common, and there are many ballads based on

1736-644: The Minnelieder of the Minnesang tradition. The earliest example of a recognizable ballad in form in England is " Judas " in a 13th-century manuscript . Ballads were originally written to accompany dances, and so were composed in couplets with refrains in alternate lines. These refrains would have been sung by the dancers in time with the dance. Most northern and west European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four-line stanzas ) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by

1798-586: The Queen's husband, the King of Scots, which results in the birth of a baby. Mary kills the infant – in some versions by casting it out to sea or drowning , and in others by exposure . The crime is seen and she is convicted. The ballad recounts Mary's thoughts about her life and her impending death in a first-person narrative . Versions of the ballad have been recorded by a number of artists, including Joan Baez , The Corries , and Angelo Branduardi . Most versions of

1860-601: The Robin Hood legend. Another common feature of ballads is repetition, sometimes of fourth lines in succeeding stanzas, as a refrain , sometimes of third and fourth lines of a stanza and sometimes of entire stanzas. Scholars of ballads have been divided into "communalists", such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and the Brothers Grimm , who argue that ballads are originally communal compositions, and "individualists" such as Cecil Sharp , who assert that there

1922-474: The Scottish Border . Burns collaborated with James Johnson on the multi-volume Scots Musical Museum , a miscellany of folk songs and poetry with original work by Burns. Around the same time, he worked with George Thompson on A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice . Both Northern English and Southern Scots shared in the identified tradition of Border ballads , particularly evinced by

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1984-542: The authors and performers are often referred to as bush bards. The 19th century was the golden age of bush ballads. Several collectors have catalogued the songs including John Meredith whose recording in the 1950s became the basis of the collection in the National Library of Australia . The songs tell personal stories of life in the wide open country of Australia. Typical subjects include mining, raising and droving cattle, sheep shearing , wanderings, war stories,

2046-535: The ballad form among social elites and intellectuals, particularly in the Romantic movement from the later 18th century. Respected literary figures Robert Burns and Walter Scott in Scotland collected and wrote their own ballads. Similarly in England William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced a collection of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that included Coleridge's The Rime of

2108-416: The ballad were modified to form the basis for twenty-three bawdy pornographic ballads that appeared in the underground Victorian magazine The Pearl , which ran for eighteen issues between 1879 and 1880. Unlike the traditional ballad, these obscene ballads aggressively mocked sentimental nostalgia and local lore. Broadside ballads (also known as 'broadsheet', 'stall', 'vulgar' or 'come all ye' ballads) were

2170-459: The ballad. She refers by name to Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael as recurrent personae, leaving only Mary Hamilton, the narrator of the ballad, unmentioned. Mary Beton plays the prominent role in Woolf's extended essay, as she serves as the speaker. According to her narrator in A Room of One's Own , "'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being." A few sentences later,

2232-457: The blues musical format. The most famous blues ballads include those about John Henry and Casey Jones . The ballad was taken to Australia by early settlers from Great Britain and Ireland and gained particular foothold in the rural outback . The rhyming songs, poems and tales written in the form of ballads often relate to the itinerant and rebellious spirit of Australia in The Bush , and

2294-444: The burlesques and musical plays of Thomas d'Urfey (1653–1723), a number of whose collected ballads they used in their work. Gay produced further works in this style, including a sequel under the title Polly . Henry Fielding , Colley Cibber , Arne, Dibdin, Arnold, Shield, Jackson of Exeter, Hook and many others produced ballad operas that enjoyed great popularity. Ballad opera was attempted in America and Prussia. Later it moved into

2356-629: The common themes of sailing and naval battles may also have prompted the use (at least in England) of popular ballads as naval recruitment tools. Key work on the traditional ballad was undertaken in the late 19th century in Denmark by Svend Grundtvig and for England and Scotland by the Harvard professor Francis James Child . They attempted to record and classify all the known ballads and variants in their chosen regions. Since Child died before writing

2418-564: The conceit of one rehearser, unintelligible blunders from the stupidity of another, and omissions equally to be regretted, from the want of memory of a third.' Similarly, John Robert Moore noted 'a natural tendency to oblivescence'. European Ballads have been generally classified into three major groups: traditional, broadside and literary. In America a distinction is drawn between ballads that are versions of European, particularly British and Irish songs, and 'Native American ballads', developed without reference to earlier songs. A further development

2480-502: The cross-border narrative in versions of " The Ballad of Chevy Chase " sometimes associated with the Lancashire-born sixteenth-century minstrel Richard Sheale . It has been suggested that the increasing interest in traditional popular ballads during the eighteenth century was prompted by social issues such as the enclosure movement as many of the ballads deal with themes concerning rural laborers. James Davey has suggested that

2542-562: The end of the 15th century there are printed ballads that suggest a rich tradition of popular music. A reference in William Langland 's Piers Plowman indicates that ballads about Robin Hood were being sung from at least the late 14th century and the oldest detailed material is Wynkyn de Worde's collection of Robin Hood ballads printed about 1495. Early collections of English ballads were made by Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and in

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2604-496: The faith o' a dying thief. Be given through grace tae me Yest're'en the Queen had fower Maries The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Car-Michael and me. There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Car-Michael and me. —————————— Notes to the lyrics: Ballad While ballads have no prescribed structure and may vary in their number of lines and stanzas, many ballads employ quatrains with ABCB or ABAB rhyme schemes ,

2666-473: The history of women and fiction. The name reappears in the character of the narrator's aunt, who serves as both the namesake and benefactor of Mary Beton. Woolf is able to detach herself from the narrative voice of the essay through the use of Beton. Mary Seton is a friend of Mary Beton at the fictitious Fernham College (modelled after Cambridge's Newnham and Girton Colleges ). It is partially through her conversations with Seton that Beton raises questions about

2728-401: The key being a rhymed second and fourth line. Contrary to a popular conception, it is rare if not unheard-of for a ballad to contain exactly 13 lines. Additionally, couplets rarely appear in ballads. Many ballads were written and sold as single-sheet broadsides . The form was often used by poets and composers from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century,

2790-403: The medieval French chanson balladée or ballade , which were originally "dancing songs" ( L : ballare , to dance), yet becoming "stylized forms of solo song" before being adopted in England. As a narrative song, their theme and function may originate from Scandinavian and Germanic traditions of storytelling that can be seen in poems such as Beowulf . Musically they were influenced by

2852-417: The melody from "Mary Hamilton" for his 1963 song " The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll ". The song recounts the story of black woman who died after being struck with a cane by William Zantzinger, a young white man who came from a wealthy family and who was ultimately sentenced to six months in prison for his crime. Writer Mike Marqusee compared the two songs as being about women "whose [lives are] destroyed by

2914-541: The mid-1950s, sung by Jeannie Robertson of Aberdeen and Ethel Findlater of Dounby , Orkney , and another version sung by Mary Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints , Lincolnshire , England . Fred Hamer recorded Fred Jordan of Ludlow , Shropshire singing 'The Four Marys' in 1966. The song made its way to the United States , where Alan Lomax recorded Texas Gladden of Virginia singing a version in 1941, and traditional singer Almeda Riddle of Arkansas performed

2976-564: The middle classes, had their origins in the early " Tin Pan Alley " music industry of the later 19th century. They were generally sentimental, narrative, strophic songs published separately or as part of an opera (descendants perhaps of broadside ballads , but with printed music , and usually newly composed). Such songs include "Little Rosewood Casket" (1870), " After the Ball " (1892) and " Danny Boy ". The association with sentimentality led to

3038-459: The narrator returns to the concept of identity and subjectivity and invokes the subjects of the ballad for the first time: "Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of importance)..." Mary Beton serves as the narrator throughout A Room of One's Own . The six chapters of the essay follow Mary Beton's walks through Oxbridge grounds and London streets, and her mental explorations of

3100-598: The regions in which they originate and use the common dialect of the people. Scotland 's ballads in particular, both in theme and language, are strongly characterised by their distinctive tradition, even exhibiting some pre-Christian influences in the inclusion of supernatural elements such as travel to the Fairy Kingdom in the Scots ballad "Tam Lin". The ballads do not have any known author or correct version; instead, having been passed down mainly by oral tradition since

3162-436: The relationship between financial wealth and the opportunities for female education. Speaking of Mary Seton's mother, the narrator states, "If she had left two or three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease tonight and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography." Mary Carmichael plays

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3224-406: The role of a fictitious author referenced by the narrator in A Room of One's Own . Her fabricated novel, Life's Adventure , allows Woolf to introduce the concept of female relationships. Mary Carmichael may also evoke the idea of the real author and birth-control activist Marie Carmichael (pseudonym for Marie Stopes ) and her novel Love's Creation . American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan adapted

3286-400: The sea But I wish I could lie in our ain kirkyard Beneath yon old oak tree Where we pulled the rowans and strung the gowans My brothers and sisters and me Yest're'en the Queen had fower Maries The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Car-Michael and me. But why should I fear a nameless grave When I've hopes for eternity And I'll pray that

3348-640: The song are set in Edinburgh (Scotland's traditional capital), but Joan Baez set her version, possibly the best known, in Glasgow , ending with these words: This verse suggests Mary Hamilton was one of the famous Four Maries , four girls named Mary who were chosen by the queen mother and regent Mary of Guise to be companion ladies-in-waiting to her daughter, the child monarch Mary, Queen of Scots . However their names were Mary Seton , Mary Beaton , Mary Fleming and Mary Livingston . Mary Stuart could not be

3410-612: The term "ballad" being used for slow love songs from the 1950s onwards. Modern variations include " jazz ballads ", " pop ballads ", " rock ballads ", " R&B ballads " and " power ballads ". James Madison Carpenter James Madison Carpenter , born in 1888 in Blacklands, Mississippi, near Booneville , in Prentiss County , was a Methodist minister and scholar of American and British folklore . He received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from

3472-412: The term took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song and is often used for any love song, particularly the sentimental ballad of pop or rock music, although the term is also associated with the concept of a stylized storytelling song or poem, particularly when used as a title for other media such as a film. A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music . Ballads derive from

3534-447: The whims of the powerful". Yest're'en the Queen had fower Maries The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Car-Michael and me. Oh little did my mother think The day she cradled me The lands I was to travel in The death I was tae die Oh tie a napkin roon my eyen No let me seen to die And sent me a'wa tae my dear mother Who's far away o'er

3596-602: Was also the Tsar's mistress. She bore a child in 1717, who may have been fathered by the Tsar but whom she admitted drowning shortly after its birth. She also stole trinkets from the Tsarina to present them to her lover Ivan Orlov. For the murder of her child, she was beheaded in 1719. Mary's head was preserved and displayed in the Kunstkamera , a palace holding natural and scientific "curiosities" . At that time, Charles Wogan

3658-458: Was in Russia on a mission for James Francis Edward Stuart , and through him news of the incident might have reached Scotland. Dozens of traditional versions of the ballad have been recorded. James Madison Carpenter recorded several versions in Scotland in the early 1930s, which can be heard online via the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library . Peter Kennedy recorded two Scottish versions in

3720-516: Was murdered 20 months later, when he was king of Scots and joint ruler with Mary. So there was not much time for Darnley to have got one of the four Maries (or any other mistress) pregnant, and there is no record of him having done so. Also the song refers to "the highest Stuart of all" – which between 1542 and 1567 was a woman not a man. The ballad could contain echoes of James IV or James V , who both had several illegitimate children, but none of their mistresses were executed or tried to dispose of

3782-438: Was one single original author. Communalists tend to see more recent, particularly printed, broadside ballads of known authorship as a debased form of the genre, while individualists see variants as corruptions of an original text. More recently scholars have pointed to the interchange of oral and written forms of the ballad. The transmission of ballads comprises a key stage in their re-composition. In romantic terms this process

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3844-454: Was the evolution of the blues ballad, which mixed the genre with Afro-American music. For the late 20th century the music publishing industry found a market for what are often termed sentimental ballads, and these are the origin of the modern use of the term 'ballad' to mean a slow love song. The traditional, classical or popular (meaning of the people) ballad has been seen as beginning with the wandering minstrels of late medieval Europe. From

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