Lucy (Child 51)

A version of this ballad, allocated the title Lucy Wan (cf. Lizie Wan in Child) appeared in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. This was based on the fragmentary version recorded in 1932 from Mrs. Dann of Cottenham, Cambs., to which the authors (specifically A. L. Lloyd, one suspects) had added three and half verses from Child’s A text. These served to set the scene, making it clear that Lucy’s baby was the result of incest with her brother, and supplying a gory description of poor Lucy’s body being cut into three pieces.

Another fragmentary text, collected by George Gardiner from Frank Harrington of Bartley, Hampshire, in 1908, and kindly communicated to me by Bob Askew, had a tune that I found more interesting, and three intriguing verses: essentially, 3 and 9 below, plus a jumbled verse consisting of the first half of v4 and the second half of v8. These put a slightly different slant on the story, with Lucy confessing her misdeed not to her father (as in Child), nor her brother (as in some North American versions and Penguin), but to her sister. The conversation is overheard by the brother who then (I infer, since the Harrington song doesn’t mention the fact) plots her murder – or conceivably an abortion that goes horribly wrong.

To make some kind of sense of the events, I collated the Harrington fragment with the two Scottish texts in Child and two detailed and coherent versions collected in Vermont by Helen Hartness Flanders. I begin with two verses common to Child and the American variants, with the sister substituted for father or brother. V3 (“O’er field….”) is from Harrington, with an imported final line pointing the finger of guilt at the brother; v4 uses Harrington’s two floating lines and is completed with lines of my own; v5 is from Vermont.

The “What’s that blood?” sequence is common to Child 13, Edward, and the range of vengefully-slaughtered household pets used to excuse the tell-tale stains in variants of the two ballads includes greyhound, grey goose, grey horse, grey mare, yellow dog, “gross hog”, guinea pig and “English crow”. I chose to use the “greyhound” verses, before closing my ballad with stanzas from Harrington.

It’s a commonplace that Edward and Lizie Wan are related ballads, and comparison of the versions collected in the 20th century suggests that they are very closely intertwined. I draw your attention to the song, filed under Edward and collected by Peter Kennedy in the 1950s, which has a tune strikingly similar to Mrs. Dann’s Lucy and an essentially similar text, except that in the former the blood is that of the “mother of three”. Quite what this signifies I’m not sure, but it’s an entertaining snippet of trivia at the very least.