Down In The Willow Garden: A Song History

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"Down in the Willow Garden," also sung as "Rose Connoley" (the name is spelled many ways), is a murder ballad: the narrator drugs Rose with wine, stabs her and throws her into the river, trusting his father's promise that money would get him off, and ends up facing the gallows.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index classes it as Laws F6 and Roud 446, reports it from the Appalachian and Southeastern United States, and gives 1917 as its earliest date, credited to Cox's Folk Songs of the South.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive records an Irish air called "Rose Connolly," noted by Edward Bunting in Coleraine in 1811, and cites the view that the American ballad reworks the story of the Irish song while having no musical link to Bunting's tune.[2] In the sources consulted here, how the song made its way to the mountains of the American South is not documented.[1][2]

Etching of a large gnarled willow tree by a riverbank, with a town and windmill in the distance

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), The Omval, etching and drypoint; second state of two, 1645. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter recorded it as "Rose Conley" in Atlanta on October 18, 1927, at a Victor session supervised by Ralph Peer, with Grayson singing and fiddling and Whitter on guitar; it came out on Victor 21625.[3] John Moulden, cited in the Tune Archive, suggests the ballad was not widespread in Appalachia before Peer's recordings of the 1920s.[2] Later recordings listed by the Ballad Index include a 1937 Bluebird recording that the Index lists under J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers or, alternatively, Wade Mainer and Zeke Morris, Charlie Monroe & His Kentucky Pardners (1947), the Osborne Brothers with Red Allen (1957), and a 1940s recording by Texas Gladden with Hobart Smith.[1]

Maureen Sellers includes it in Simply Duets, a book of older songs arranged as duets for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Down In The Willow Garden"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Rose Connoley".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Rose Connolly".
  3. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-40305. Rose Conley / Grayson and Whitter".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Duets".
  5. Image: Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), The Omval, etching and drypoint; second state of two, 1645. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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