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about

It was in researching this song that I first started to feel okay with the concept of adapting and re­phrasing songs. On the Mainly Norfolk site, I found this quote from James Porter and Herschel Gower’s biography of Jeannie Robertson: “Hamish Henderson learned this song from Jock MacShannon while engaged in fieldwork in Kintyre (Stephanie Smith 1975: 241). He then taught it to Jeannie, who substituted ‘James’ for MacShannon's ‘George” in the first stanza, presumably because of the number of Stuart kings in Scotland with that name. She subsequently taught it to [her daughter] Lizzie, who had recorded the song on disc. Smith has suggested that the change in names was to make the text more Scottish, or more local, and the presence of words like ‘mavis’ (thrush) hints at a nineteenth-­century reworking and localization of a text such as that recorded by Sam Henry (1923­29, 2:282) from a County Antrim informant.”

lyrics

I once was a ploughboy, but a soldier I am now
I courted with lovely Molly as I followed the plough
I courted with lovely Molly at the age of sixteen
But now I must leave her and serve James my king.

Lovely Molly, lovely Molly, despite all your charms
There is many’s a night you have laid in my arms
And if ever I return again it will be in the spring
Where the mavis and the turtledove and the nightingale sing.

You may go to the market, you may go to the fair
You may go to the church Sunday and meet your new love there.
And if anybody loves you half as much as I do
Then I won’t stop your marriage, farewell love, adieu.

Lovely Molly, lovely Molly, despite all your charms
There is many’s a night you have laid in my arms
And if ever I return again it will be in the spring
Where the mavis and the turtledove and the nightingale sing.

credits

from My Mind From Love Being Free, released May 1, 2015

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Lindsay Straw Boston, Massachusetts

Traditional folk singer, guitarist & bouzouki player.

"Hearken(s) back to more innocent times, of Greenwich Village and pure folk." - The Living Tradition

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