Bonny Bonny Broome (also called Broom Of Cowdenknows): A Song History

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John Playford printed this melody as “The bonny bonny Broome” in the first edition of The English Dancing Master in 1651.[1][2] The tune was older than that: the Traditional Tune Archive dates its use for broadside ballads to at least 1632, and notes a copy, as “Broom of crude knous,” in Lady Margaret Wemyss’s music book, begun in 1643.[1] Its other name appears on a London broadside, “The lovely Northern Lasse,” in which a young woman laments what befell her while milking her father’s ewes, set “To a pleasant Scotch tune, called, The broom of Cowden knowes.”[3] Other ballad-makers simply named “the bonny broome” as their tune; Martin Parker’s “The Bonny Bryer,” a Lancashire girl’s lament, is one example.[4][5] The broom of the title is the shrub.[1] Cowdenknowes is an estate on the east bank of the Leader Water, about a mile south of Earlston in Berwickshire, which the Ordnance Survey’s 1850s name book describes as famous for the song and its air.[6]

Mezzotint of a castle ruin above a river at sunrise, with cattle drinking at the water

J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle on the Tweed, from Liber Studiorum, etching and mezzotint, 1816. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A Border scene on the River Tweed; it is not Cowdenknowes.

Sources differ on whether the tune is Scottish.[1][5] Antiquarian researchers, among them William Stenhouse and G. F. Graham, thought it probably Scottish and traced it to the mid-17th century.[1] William Chappell, in Popular Music of the Olden Time, argued that it was English.[5] He noted that “Scotch” appears only in the Northern Lasse ballad and not in the many others sung to the tune, and that the tune is not in what he called the Scottish scale.[5] He also pointed out that Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy cites it as a common English country tune.[5] Chappell found the dance tune in editions of The Dancing Master up to 1698.[5] He also identified the first Scottish words for it as a set in Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany of 1724, which keeps the subject of the older English refrain.[5] The melody then appeared in Scottish collections such as Orpheus Caledonius (1725) and The Scots Musical Museum (1787), and John Gay used it in The Beggar’s Opera.[1]

Two Scottish songs called “The Broom of Cowdenknows” share this tune’s name, and the Traditional Ballad Index keeps them apart.[7][8] One is Child ballad 217, in which a gentleman lies with a shepherdess without her consent and later returns to claim her.[7] The other is a lyric love song in which the singer is exiled for loving a girl.[8] According to the Index, the tune usually sung today belongs to the lyric, and its editors see no particular reason to think the Child ballad used it before the 20th century.[8] The Playford air has also lived on as a dance tune: the Tune Archive lists it in Cecil Sharp’s Country Dance Tunes (1909) and in later English country dance tune books by Raven and Barnes.[1] It also lists recordings by the Baltimore Consort, Silly Wizard and the King’s Noyse.[1]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Broom the Bonny Bonny Broom".
  2. Greg Lindahl (facsimile): John Playford, "The English Dancing Master" (London, 1651), "The bonny bonny Broome".
  3. English Broadside Ballad Archive (UC Santa Barbara): "The lovely Northern Lasse" (EBBA 31921, Euing Ballads 166).
  4. English Broadside Ballad Archive (UC Santa Barbara): "The Bonny Bryer, or A Lancashire Lasse" (EBBA 30473).
  5. Internet Archive: William Chappell, "Popular Music of the Olden Time," vol. 2 (London, 1855–59), "The Broom, the Bonny Broom," pp. 458–461.
  6. ScotlandsPlaces: Berwickshire OS Name Books, 1856–1858, vol. 16, p. 55 (Cowdenknowes).
  7. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Broom of Cowdenknows [Child 217]".
  8. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Broom o the Cowdenknowes (II - lyric)".