Covid Journal, Day 56: Pretty Saro

37 and frosty this morning. Even colder temperatures are expected tonight. We didn't cover plants last night, but will have to do so this evening. A rough May so far, with so much rain and now freezing temperatures.

So today I'm sharing the ballad Pretty Saro. I had long thought, for some reason, that it was based on a Scottish ballad, but I should have known better because the song is so lyrical and musical, very much in the line of Irish love songs. I knew it was derived from the old song Streams of Bunclody, but for some reason had it in my head that Bunclody was in Scotland. So now I know better!

This was the first ballad I learned to sing when I stumbled accidentally into the world of traditional ballads. It was a whole new thing to me, and I fell immediately in love. I was 50, and had never sung in public except with children, but my voice seemed to find its home with these old songs. Of course, ballads were intended to be sung by ordinary people, and that makes them accessible to anyone willing to give them a go.

There are many floating verses in Pretty Saro, verses borrowed from other songs. Some believe the song originated in North Carolina among Irish immigrants who cobbled it from Streams of Bunclody. In a July 1911 article by John A. Lomax, published in The North Carolina Booklet, Lomax notes that the song was collected by Miss Edith B. Fisk of White Rock, North Carolina, who said she got it from an old woman who knew "one hundred love songs and one hundred songs of devilment". I'd love to have heard some of those devilment songs!

Different versions have different dates in them, although most scholars believe the original date in the song to be 1749. It may have been changed by later immigrants to 1849, a time of great Irish migration to the United States in the wake of the Great Famine in Ireland. Interestingly, my son found a record in his family tree attributing the song to Oliver Merritt Hamblet, one of his ancestors on his father's side. According to the family record, Hamblet wrote the song in 1867. Was he the actual author of the song we know as Pretty Saro? Here is his version of the song, noted by some on Ancestry as a poem:

I looked all around me, and I was alone,
and me a poor soldier and a long way from home.
Farewell my dear Father, likewise Mother too,
I'm going to wonder this country all through.
There's nothing that grieves me, or troubles my mind,
but leaving my darling pretty Sarah behind.
I wish I were a poet, and could write a fine hand,
I'd write my love a letter that she might understand.
I'd send it by the water when the islands ore flow
and I'll think of pretty Sarah wherever I go.
My love she want (won't) have me and I understand
She wants a free holder, and I have no land
On the banks of Watauga or the mountains top's brow
I loved you then dearly, and I still love you now.

Quite different from my version, which I learned from the singing of Cas Wallin of North Carolina--and after years of singing it, I realized my version is now quite different from Mr. Wallins. Such is the way of oral tradition!

The Mainly Norfolk site offers this information Pretty Saro:

The Frank C Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore suggests that that the odd line “banks of said brow” might be a corruption of the line of the another version which has “the mountain's sad brow”

The use of the word “freeholder” places the song’s origin in England as the term is not used in the United States.

"It appears that Pretty Saro and its doppelgaenger At the Foot of Yonder Mountain are mostly derived from The Streams of Bunclody. The 1749 date looks good too. There is a local tradition that The Streams of Bunclody was written from America by an immigrant from County Wicklow and sent back to Ireland. If this immigrant or a son or daughter or someone who had the song from him was among the early European settlers of the Appalachians, the American versions could easily have been adapted from the immigrant's song. 1749 could be the date of the immigrant's arrival in America, although the stanza with the date did not go back to Ireland or was dropped there. Of course, there are a lot of floating lyrics here, and John Moulden points out the dangers of taking such material as a basis for identifying oral texts as versions of the same song. What one must look for is distinctive stanzas; otherwise there would be just one song of which Pretty Saro, On Top of Old Smokey, It Was in the Month of January, The Wagoner's Lad, and countless others would be examples. But these do have distinctive content and it seems that Streams of Bunclody begat Pretty Saro."

Sources:
Ancestry.comAncestry.com. Oliver Merritt Hamblett, from the book by Beecher Hamlet Hamblet/Hamlet Family.

The Traditional Ballad Index, Pretty Saro

Streams of Bunclody

Mainly Norfolk 


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