singemonkey wrote:
Bob, do you know that song, The (Bonny) Boys of Bedlam? I know it from a Steeleye Span record. It's got this great line about the cook with his knife to, "... cut mince pies from childrens' thighs/with which to feed the fairies."
I don't know that one. I'm no student of the British folk canon, I pick up bits here and there via albums that I listen to.
We had a discussion recently on the forum about savage images in folk songs. You don't even have to go that far back. Martin Simpson does a song "Duncan & Brady" which
a) is just over 100 years old now
b) beat Johnny Cash to the line "Gonna shoot somebody just to watch them die"
c) Repeats a true story.
Or there's Stagger Lee and it's variants which tell another true story. Basically that bad man, that cruel man Stagger Lee killed a man for laughing at his hat.
Bleaker still, in the Simpson set list, is Andrew Lammie, another true story which tells of what we'd now call an honour killing (though, personally, I've never seen anything particularly honourable in the concept). Bonny Annie falls in love with the trumpeter Andrew Lammie. Of course he's not high enough born, and after spells of starving and swooning and a charge of witchcraft that can't be made to stick, her family solve the problem by breaking her back across the church steps.
It's not all buttercups and daisies and here we go round the maypole.
