Child 295 Comment

Child 295 The Brown Girl

Both of the versions of Child 295 were sent to Child by the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould. It is my considered opinion that 295B is a collation by Baring Gould of 295A and a common broadside ballad ‘The Dover Sailor’/’Sally and her True Love Billy’.

295A itself is a very rare broadside ballad consisting largely of a collection of unrelated stanzas taken from various well-known traditional ballads, mostly identified by Child. He gives the following references to other Child ballads:- 73; 77 A4, B2, 9 ,C6 ,14, D4, 13, E6, 14; 84 B12; 69 A20-22, D11, 14, E17-20, G23-25; 78 B2, E2, F2. The numbers 73, 77, 84, 69 and 78 are Child ballad numbers. The capital letters refer to different versions of each ballad, and the numbers following the capitals are those of stanzas within each version, so '77 A4' means the fourth stanza of version A of Child 77, Sweet Willam's Ghost'.

The version sent to Child comes from a British Library garland collected and bound into a book of garlands by John Bell (BL 11621.c.3 (10) of the late eighteenth century, printed by John White. There is one other version of this ballad with two extra stanzas on a slip in the Madden Collection. (See ballad text page for a full transcript)

Nothing resembling Baring Gould’s concoction, 295B, occurs anywhere else in print or in oral tradition. Versions of ‘The Dover Sailor’ are numerous on early nineteenth century broadsides (See ballad text page for an early version) and in oral tradition, particularly in North America. A detailed analysis of how Baring Gould constructed his hybrid ballad can be seen in my article in Folk Song Tradition, Revival, and Re-Creation, edited by Ian Russell and David Atkinson, The Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, 2004, Chapter 28, pages 363-376.

In my original paper, read at a major conference to mark the centenary of the founding of the Folk Song Society, held at the University of Sheffield in 1998, I conjectured the motives Baring Gould could have had for knowingly sending a bogus ballad to Child. He had sent several others to Child on earlier occasions which had either been rejected or relegated to appendixes and had been criticized as literary forgeries.

In my opinion Baring Gould’s main motive lay in his anti-authority/trickster nature which is well documented in his biographies. I think he saw in Child a rich influential figure of authority, and Baring Gould had personally expended much energy in the field collecting ballads. Here he perceived a wealthy Yankee with no experience in the field buying up all the available manuscripts. As far as Baring Gould was concerned he was a prime target.

Another motive for sending the batches of ballads, including many genuine ones I hasten to add, can be gleaned from Baring Gould’s correspondence with Child. ( Copies now available in the VWML) It appears Baring Gould was struggling financially to maintain his large house and family at the time Child was publishing the 10 volumes of ESPB. They were expensive to buy and have shipped from America, so in sending Child the batches of ballads he tried to persuade Child to send him copies of the published volumes at a discount.

One other possible motive might have been a desire to test Child’s powers of spotting a bogus ballad, or he may have seen it as a challenge following Child’s rejection of some of his other efforts.

Whatever the motive, he certainly fooled Child on this occasion, and in fact most American collectors throughout the first half of the twentieth century, who published many common or garden versions of ‘The Dover Sailor’ under the heading of ‘The Brown Girl’. Personally I can empathise with Baring Gould and it is difficult nowadays not to admire his cocking a snook at pompous authority as he saw it. I could admire him much more had he left behind some hint of a confession. But perhaps eventually some more solid evidence will surface among the extensive archives he left behind which still have to be fully documented.

Steve Gardham