Single Song Sunday: Barbara Allen
(Meg Baird, Colin Meloy, Laura Cortese & 10 more!)
May 20th, 2012 — 12:43 pm
Traditional death ballads aren’t a dime a dozen on the modern papcharts, but they’re a recognizable form among the folkways. Most deal frankly with unrequited and/or unequal love and its aftereffects, with gruesome detail and haunted characters; most go so far as to show the callousness of humankind through ghosts and body parts transformed, though history suggests that such lascivious imagery was more commonplace in the Puritan and previous worlds, where the funerial was a family affair, life lessons were taught and learned through song, pining could kill, and death in its stark bodily form was an everpresent part of life.
The Ballad of Barbara Allen – also known by several similar names, and recorded canonically as Child Ballad 84, of Northern English or Scottish origin – isn’t a murder ballad, specifically; it is instead a warning tale of despair and rue, with a simple yet beautiful melody and virtually infinite variation in its lyrics. As such, the song makes for both a particularly beautiful example of and a potent template for the larger form.
The story is simply told: two would-be lovers die in sequence – first he, of her spurned love; then she, of a belated grief at her cruelty in his passing – thus reinforcing the lesson that acknowledging the heart’s need, and being kind in its honest expression, are fundamental to life itself. In many variants, the final verses paint a pretty picture of posthumous reconciliation, in which a briar growing from her grave, and a rose from his, entwine themselves over the lovers’ buried corpses. But regardless of whether this coda is included or no, the tonal narrative remains consistent.
The universality of Barbara Allen’s moral, and of the emotional core which it takes to reveal it, anticipate the confessional mode of the folk music revival, underscoring its presence as one of the modern folk canon’s most repeated songs. Yet just as our response to dismissal-driven death can range from outrage to sorrow, so do the various versions of this old song cover the emotional gamut.
At the extremes, Laura Cortese and Jefferson Hamer‘s saw and rage play well against the sliding melancholy of aging guitarsmith Martin Simpson, while Colin Meloy‘s pinched nasality and full band folk rock turn come in a far tonal cry from the sweet delicacy Lucy Wainright Roche brings to her take. In between, a half-century of versioning offers a breadth of potential as The Waterboys go whispery and sparse, Sunita Staneslow plucks harpstrings under instrumental pipes, The Lilly Brothers and Don Stover play a bluegrass ballad, Shirley Collins floats a nearly medieval take over hollow reeds, Deborah Packard trills thin and sweet over a low drone and haunting flute, Kate Burke and Ruth Hazleton lend Aussie accents and a staggering 5/4 meter to pulsing celtic tones, Jean Ritchie sings a solo appalachian plainsong, Emmylou Harris croons contemporary, and Meg Baird remakes the song as a singer-songwriter’s lament, complete with backporch harmonies and cowboy guitar. Listen singly below, or click to download the entire set for comparison’s sake.