Billy Boy: A Song History

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"Billy Boy" unfolds as a dialogue in which Billy, pressed with questions, admits to a sweetheart still too young to leave home and lists her accomplishments one answer at a time.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index, which files it as Roud 326, gives its earliest date as 1776, from the Scottish collector David Herd as reported in Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.[1][2][3] Early texts in Scots call the boy Tammy, among them "The Lammy," a broadside printed in Newcastle between about 1800 and 1810, and "My Boy Tammy" in Johnson's Scots Musical Museum of 1797.[1][2] Sources differ on who shaped those texts: Walter de la Mare credited "My Boy Tammy" to the poet Hector MacNeill, and A. L. Lloyd dated its first printing to 1791, but the Index's editors doubt that MacNeill originated the song and suggest he may have written a popular new version of it.[1][2] Some scholars have also linked it with the ballad "Lord Randal" (Child 12): Sabine Baring-Gould, who took down a version from a West Country nurse in 1885, traced it to that ballad, and Bertrand Bronson printed 29 versions in an appendix to "Lord Randal" in his Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads.[1][2][3] Others are skeptical: Lloyd doubted the connection, Rod Stradling found the evidence "rather thin," and the Index keeps the two songs apart because they share little beyond courtship and meter.[1][2]

Engraving of a young soldier leaning on a horse and gazing at a young woman in a straw hat, while a boy bends over a basket of fish and a dog barks

George Shepheard, Love at First Sight, stipple engraving and etching, 1796. A young man taken with a country girl, shown for the song’s courting theme; it has no connection to the song.

Cecil Sharp printed it as "My Boy Willie" in One Hundred English Folksongs (1916) and, under the title "My Boy Billy," gave three texts with tunes in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.[1][3] The Index lists some 60 references, from Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs to the Frank C. Brown collection from North Carolina, whose editors mention 47 texts, and to books from Nova Scotia and Vermont, and Stradling, writing in 2014, counted 318 examples in the Roud index, mostly from North America.[1][2][3] Sailors also used it as a capstan shanty, and Stan Hugill printed it in Shanties from the Seven Seas.[1][2][3] Frank Crumit recorded it for Victor on December 22, 1925, and it came out in May 1926 on Victor 19945, paired with "Grandfather's Clock."[4] Library of Congress field recordings from 1939 include a performance by Shirley Lomax Duggan near Comanche, Texas, and one in Jacksonville, Florida, by Rev. Harden W. Stuckey, who sang it as a lullaby under the title "Where Have You Been, Charming Billy."[5][6] In the revival, Jean Ritchie recorded it as "My Boy Willie" on a 1952 Elektra album, and Martin Carthy sang it on his 1974 album Sweet Wivelsfield.[2]

Maureen Sellers includes it in My Teaching Book For Appalachian Dulcimer, Volume One, a 48-page instruction book for the Appalachian mountain dulcimer that combines basics and how-tos with a variety of songs, published by Fingers Of Steel.[7]

Our books that contain the song "Billy Boy"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Billy Boy".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "Billy Boy".
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Bibliography".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor 19945".
  5. Library of Congress: "Billy Boy" (Shirley Lomax Duggan, 1939).
  6. Library of Congress: "Where Have You Been, Charming Billy" (Harden W. Stuckey, 1939).
  7. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, My Teaching Book For Appalachian Dulcimer, Volume One".
  8. Image: George Shepheard, Love at First Sight, stipple engraving and etching, 1796. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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