Eugene Dunphy tracks the journey of a much-loved and well-travelled ballad

 

On the evening of the 6th of February, 1962, the auditorium of the Community College in Auburn, New York, was the venue for a medium-sized crowd who were there to watch a special concert performance by Jean Ritchie, a forty-year-old folk singer from Kentucky.

For many years Jean and her thirteen siblings – eleven girls and two boys – had been steeped in the songs and melodies of Appalachia, an area of America that had become home for many immigrants from Scots-Irish and English descent.

Jean never saw the study of the ballads and melodies of her area as a serious and soulless academic pursuit; far from it, she saw this music as a means by which the heartaches, joys and humour of real people could be expressed.

She charmed her Auburn audience when she introduced a multi-versed ballad in her distinctive south Kentucky drawl: “This one’s tragic and long, so… get comfortable” and then, while gently strumming a dulcimer, she proceeded to sing, ‘Black is the colour of my true love’s hair …’

This ballad had in fact featured on her 1952 album, Jean Ritchie Singing the Traditional Songs of her Kentucky Mountain Family. It is generally agreed by folk song collectors that Black is the Colour (writer unknown) may date back to the eighteenth century, and that it had its origins either in Scotland or England. But where and from whom did Jean learn the ballad?

The cryptic answer is that she acquired it from two English people, who she never met, by way of a lady in North Carolina, who she also never met. But the shorter answer is; ‘Jean learned it from a book’.

The story goes as follows: at the onset of World War One, English folk song collectors Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) and his young assistant Maud Karpeles (1885-1976) decided to go to America in search of songs.

They soon found themselves trekking over dirt tracks and tramping over hillocks in the Appalachian Mountains, their travels taking them to remote parts of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee.

On the 15th of September 1916, they found themselves in Hot Springs, North Carolina, listening to the old stories and ballads of Lizzie Roberts, and it was from Lizzie’s singing that Cecil Sharp notated the words and music of Black is the Colour. A few years later, Sharp included the ballad in his aptly titled work, Folk Songs of English Origin collected in the Appalachian Mountains, a copy of which fell into the capable hands of Jean Ritchie.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own