Farewell To Tarwathie: A Song History
"Farewell to Tarwathie" began as a poem by George Scroggie, an Aberdeenshire writer whose dates Mainly Norfolk gives as 1826 to 1907, about the Greenland right-whale fishery of around 1850.[1] It appeared in his collection The Peasant's Lyre, printed in Aberdeen by William Bennett in 1857, whose title page gives Strichen as his place.[2] According to the Scots Language Centre, Scroggie had once worked as miller at Federate in New Deer, and Tarwathie lies roughly two miles to the north of Strichen.[3] The song is a whaler's goodbye to home, sweetheart and friends as he leaves for Greenland, with a bleak picture of the conditions he expects to find there.[4]
William Bradford, Off Greenland—Whaler Seeking Open Water, oil on canvas. Shown for its subject, a whaler in the Greenland ice; it has no connection to the song.
The poem passed into oral tradition: Gavin Greig noted a version from John Milne of Maud in 1908, by which time the words had drifted well away from Scroggie's printed text.[1] Folklorists catalog it as Roud 2562, and the Ballad Index records it in the Greig-Duncan collection.[4] According to The Singing Island, A. L. Lloyd learned the song in 1938 in Durban, South Africa, from John Sinclair, a man from Ballater.[1] Ewan MacColl recorded it around 1956 for the Riverside album Thar She Blows!, and Lloyd sang it on his 1967 Topic album Leviathan!, accompanied by Alf Edwards on concertina.[1] Lloyd heard in it "the quiet melancholy of the foc'sle at midnight," and remarked that the melody was most familiar from "Green Bushes."[1]
Roger Payne, who was handing his humpback whale recordings to musicians, gave Judy Collins a tape of them in the summer of 1969, and on her 1970 album Whales and Nightingales she sang "Farewell to Tarwathie" with real whales heard in the background.[5] NPR reports that the record earned a gold certification and that millions of listeners first heard humpback song through it.[5] Among many other recordings are those by the Ian Campbell Folk Group in 1967, Liam Clancy, who made it the title track of a 1975 album, and Isla St Clair in 1993.[1] Judy House includes it in Jam Across America, a 178-page jam book for mountain dulcimer clubs, drawn from club playlists around the country, arranged in DAD tuning and published by Judy House.[6]
Sources
- Mainly Norfolk: "Farewell to Tarwathie".
- Internet Archive (Library of Congress copy): "George Scroggie, The Peasant's Lyre: A Collection of Miscellaneous Poems (1857)".
- Scots Language Centre: "Fareweel Tae Tarwathie".
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Farewell to Tarwathie".
- NPR: "Recordings That Made Waves: The Songs That Saved The Whales".
- Judy House: "Jam Across America".
- Image: William Bradford, Off Greenland—Whaler Seeking Open Water, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.