Do You Love An Apple: A Song History
"Do You Love an Apple?" is the title the Bothy Band gave to a song catalogued under the master title "Still I Love Him." Mainly Norfolk files it as Roud 654 and lists other names including "The Black Shawl," "When I Was Single" and "I'll Go With Him Wherever He Goes"[1]. The Traditional Ballad Index, which indexes it as "Do You Love an Apple?", sums it up as a woman's catalogue of the ill-treatment she gets from an indifferent man, set against her repeated vow to stand by him; it has been found in England, in the Aberdeen area of Scotland and in Ireland[2].
Paul Cézanne, Dish of Apples, oil on canvas, ca. 1876–77. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its apples; it has no connection to the song.
Although its best-known recording is Irish, the sources consulted here suggest a more mixed picture. Rod Stradling, quoted by Mainly Norfolk, calls it "a fairly recent song": the entries in Roud's index are spread across England, none was collected before the 1950s, and none is a broadside[1]. A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl both heard the tune as a relative of "Villikins and His Dinah," and MacColl and Peggy Seeger linked the shawl verse to an older song, "The Joyful Maid and Sorrowful Wife," printed in Sam Cowell's 1850 comic songbook[1]. From the Irish side, the Ballad Index quotes Sean O Boyle's notes to a 1959 album by the singer David Hammond, which propose that the song came to Ulster from Northumbria during the American Civil War, when English cotton workers went over to work in the linen trade; that remains a suggestion, not a documented fact[2].
Early recordings include the barge skipper Bob Roberts, recorded by Peter Kennedy in Suffolk in the 1950s, and Isla Cameron in 1958[1]. Margaret Barry recorded it in New York in 1965; the Ballad Index describes her version as a retelling of her own life as a singer that holds on to a few of the old verses[2][1]. Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill sang it on the Bothy Band's first album, The Bothy Band (Mulligan, 1975), and the band named the song after the opening words of their version[1][3][4]. That recording became a source in its own right: Janet Russell and Christine Kydd (1987) and Jon Boden (2010) both learned the song from the Bothy Band[1].
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