Anachie Gordon: A Song History
"Anachie Gordon," also spelled "Annachie Gordon," is the folk-scene title of the Scottish ballad that Francis James Child printed as number 239, "Lord Saltoun and Auchanachie."[1][2][3] Child worked from two families of text: one printed in Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland (1828), with an earlier copy in Maidment's North Countrie Garland (1824), and another taken from the Murison manuscript and Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index gives 1824 (Maidment) as its earliest date and lists it as found only in Aberdeenshire.[4] Its story is a forced marriage: Jeanie Gordon loves Auchanachie, but her father gives her, for the sake of land, to the misshapen old Lord Saltoun; she refuses the bridal bed, collapses and dies, and her lover, home from the sea too late, dies beside her body.[1][4]
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Inverary Castle and Town, Scotland (Liber Studiorum, part XIII), etching, 1816. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An Argyll scene rather than the ballad’s Aberdeenshire, shown for its Scottish setting.
Child noted that the hero is placed in Strathbogie in one text and in Buchan in the other, and he gave little weight to Christie's suggestion that a real Garden of Annachie was the original hero.[1] In Child's judgement, though, this was almost certainly the ballad Mrs Brown of Falkland called "Lass o Philorth," Philorth, close to Fraserburgh, being the family seat of the Frasers of Saltoun.[1] Steve Gardham has found an anglicised, partly garbled broadside slip without imprint in the Bodleian Library's Harding Collection, which he dates to about 1800 to 1828 because it sits among Newcastle printings, and he notes shared lines with a fragment from the singing of Bell Robertson in the Greig-Duncan collection.[2] The Ballad Index reports William Bernard McCarthy's observation that it is the only Child ballad whose main metre is four beats in every line, rhymed in couplets.[4]
Nic Jones revived the ballad on The Noah's Ark Trap (1977), adapting a tune from Christie and assembling his words from Buchan, the Murison manuscript and Christie.[3] Mary Black learned it from him for her 1983 debut album, Becky Unthank of the Unthanks credited him for the version on their 2009 record, and Loreena McKennitt (1989) appears to have taken it from Black's recording.[3] Joe Rae, who recorded it as "Achnachie Gordon" in 2001, had it through his family: according to the album notes, his grandfather John Rogerson learned it in South Africa from a fellow Gordon Highlander during the Boer War.[3]
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