Songs of the Carolina Charter Colonists, 1663-1763

INTRODUCTION

In Canto the Third of Lord Byron’s Don Juan occurs one of the most famous and beautiful of his songs. Sung at the spousal rites of Don Juan and the Greek girl Haidee, it is attributed to “Their poet, a sad trimmer” (in Byron’s satire, none other than the Poet-Laureate Robert Southey). In “The Isles of Greece,” Lord Byron tells what the political slavery of a people is like, why they may remain slaves, and how alone they are to win back their freedom. It is one of Byron’s most passionate attacks against tyranny, one of his most lofty utterances on his great theme of emancipation.

Ending with the vow

the noble poet, half Highland-Scottish and wholly contemptuous of the English Tory Laureate, deliberately reverts to the satiric note, remarking—

In the Tercentenary of the Carolina Charter, we may ask, What “sung, or would, or could, or should have sung” the Carolina Charter Colonists of the century 1663-1763? What were the themes and the words of their songs like? Is any of the music preserved? If so, what is it like? Assuming that such songs and music have been preserved, what is the evidence as to the probability or certainty that some, at least, of these songs were sung by the Colonists, and how did they fit the songs into their lives? Are these songs a part of the living heritage of North Carolina today?

The answer to these questions lies, of course, in the printed records of the century, in the various collections of folksongs extant and, to some extent, in oral tradition today. Scholars know when most of the songs recorded were first mentioned or written down. The existence of a song in Scotland or England during 1663-1763 may be taken as establishing the possibility that some of the colonists could have known and sung it. The fact that a song originating in the century or earlier is still sung in the Carolinas may suggest that it was known to people who brought it to America and handed it down to their posterity. In his book The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776 (Chapel Hill: U.N.C. Press, 1961), Professor Duane Meyer has shown that the Scots who immigrated to America in the eighteenth century included many comparatively well-educated people, few illiterates. It must be remembered that the Scots peasantry—notably, the cotters—produced a Burns, and that Burns is the most eloquent preserver and creator in a long tradition of Scots song that was shared by king and commoner, laird and loon.

The following catalogue or list of songs the Carolina Charter Colonists “sung, or would, or could, or should have sung” results in a survey: of 1) several old folksong collections, with citations of these and indications of evidence as to chronology; of 2) histories of the times; and of 3) twentieth-century folksong collections representing traditional ballads and songs found in North Carolina. The collections frequently referred to will be cited as:

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Abbreviations

BCNCF: The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, edited by Newman Ivey White: II,                Ballads, and III, Songs, edited by Henry M. Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson; IV, The Music of the                Ballads, V, The Music of the Songs, edited by Jan Philip Schinhan. Durham, North Carolina: Duke                University Press, 1952, 1960, 1962.

BMCB: Bertrand E. Bronson. The Music of the Child Ballads. 2 vols. (only one published to date). Princeton,               New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960.

BABS: Peter Buchan. Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland Hitherto Unpublished. 2 vols.              Edinburgh, 1828.

CESPB: Francis James Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Boston, 1882-1898.

HJRS: James Hogg. The Jacobite Relics of Scotland....Edinburgh, 1821.

HFC: The Arthur Palmer Hudson Folklore Collection, in the Louis R. Wilson Library of the University of North            Carolina.

HFM: Arthur Palmer Hudson. Folksongs of Mississippi and Their Background. Chapel Hill: The University of            North Carolina Press, 1936.

JSMM: James Johnson. The Scot’s Musical Museum. 6 vols. Edinburgh, 1787, 1788, 1790, 1792, 1797, 1803. As cited            in Erich Schwebsch, “Schottische Volkslyrik in James Johnson’s The Scot’s Musical Museum,” Palaestra, vol.            95 (1920), Berlin: Mayer and Muller, 1920.

MJSB: G. S. Macquoid. Jacobite Songs and Ballads. London, n.d.

NCF: North Carolina Folklore, journal of the North Carolina Folklore Society, vol. I (1948); II-X (1954-1962).

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REG: Allan Ramsay. The Ever Green.... Edinburgh, ca. 1724-1737.

RTTM: Allan Ramsay. The Tea-Table Miscellany … nineteenth edition. Dublin, 1794.

SEFSA: Cecil J. Sharp. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, collected by Cecil J. Sharp....                edited by Maud J. Karpeles. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1932.

In references to these collections, Roman numerals will be used to designate volume when there is more than one volume; arabic numbers to designate pages; the abbreviation “(music)” to indicate a tune in BCNCF IV and V (which ordinarily give only the first stanza of a text); “te.” to designate text and “tu.” to designate tune (as in SEFSA, which gives both full texts and tunes).

These collections are pertinent to our purpose in 1) that they indicate what songs were current in oral tradition in England and Scotland during our century; 2) that they show what songs were available in written or printed form to people who cared to learn them in that way; and 3) that they serve as a means of checking the provenance and chronology of songs in oral tradition in North Carolina during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first fifty or sixty years of the twentieth. Several of the collections—notably, those of Percy and Ramsay—were popular in the eighteenth century. The core of Percy’s Reliques was the Percy Folio Manuscript, dating ca. 1650, and the forty-five ballads he took from this were much earlier than 1650. Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany and The Ever Green were published about midway in the century we are surveying. They were widely known and used in Scotland and England; The Tea-Table Miscellany went through at least nineteen editions. It is an interesting coincidence that the nineteenth edition, published at Dublin in 1794, a copy of which is in the University [x] of North Carolina Library, appeared in the same year in which Old East Building, on the campus of the first state university, was completed. How the Library obtained this copy is not known, but it may well have been brought to North Carolina by an English or a Scottish emigrant, just as the earlier editions were probably brought over by the first settlers. We can be certain that Colonists who brought any books of a popular nature had one or both of Ramsay’s songbooks in their luggage, and that if so those brought over were used much more frequently than we in the days of paper backs use particular books today. True, the music was not included in these two. But the tunes to songs, often referred to after the titles, were known to everybody.

The songs selected as those most likely to have been known to the Charter Colonists are arranged in five groups. These will first be indicated. Then, as each group is presented, something will be said about historical background and by way of definition and description. The contents of most songs will be summarized.