Geordie: A Song History
"Geordie" is number 209 in Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and the earliest of Child's Scottish texts is the one Robert Burns supplied to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum in 1792.[1] In the Scottish versions, Geordie, often a Gordon of Gight, lies in prison facing death, and his wife rides to Edinburgh to plead for him; in most of them she raises a ransom and leaves with him.[1] The charge varies from text to text: a killing after a battle in the north, horse theft, an affair with another man's wife, and in one text the poaching of the king's deer.[1] Summing up the whole tradition, the Traditional Ballad Index gives his crime as either killing a man or taking the king's deer, and notes that not every version lets his wife save him.[2]
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Stag and Does, brush and brown wash over graphite, 1820–73. The king’s deer of some versions, shown in fun; it has no connection to the ballad.
Any historical model for Geordie is disputed.[2] Child noted that Kinloch and others were inclined to identify him with George Gordon, fourth Earl of Huntly, who was confined in Edinburgh Castle in 1554 for failing to act against a Highland robber and escaped with a fine; Child remarked only that, if this were accepted, the ballad would be as faithful to history as many others.[1] The Ballad Index finds that the Huntly story fits the song poorly.[2] Two English broadsides also tell of a condemned Georgy: one on George Stoole, printed by H. Gosson, whose working years are put at 1607 to 1641, and a later one, printed in the last quarter of the 17th century, on the highwayman George of Oxford.[1] Child judged the Scottish ballad to be original and substantially independent, calling the English pieces mere "goodnights," but, as Kenneth Goldstein notes, the scholar Ebsworth thought the broadsides came first, so on the question of priority sources differ.[1][3] Goldstein adds that, apart from a few Scottish texts, versions collected since Child draw at least partly on 19th-century reprints of those English broadsides.[3]
A. L. Lloyd observed that Scottish singers tend to make Geordie a man of rank, and English ones a commoner on the wrong side of the law.[3] Cecil Sharp noted the song in Somerset, from Mrs Overd of Longport in 1904 and from Charles Neville of East Coker in 1908, and the ballad also appears in his English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.[3][2] Harry Cox sang it for Mervyn Plunkett in 1958, Shirley Collins made her first recording of it in 1959, and Martin Carthy sang it on his 1976 album Crown of Horn.[3] Joan Baez sang it on Joan Baez in Concert, a Vanguard recording issued in Britain by Fontana in 1962.[4] Aubrey Atwater includes "Geordie" in Song By Song, Vol. I, a book of old-time favorites for mountain dulcimer, banjo, whistle, guitar and voice, where it appears among the songs given with lyrics and chord symbols for any instrument.[5]
Sources
- Project Gutenberg: "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume IV," ed. Francis James Child (No. 209, "Geordie").
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Geordie [Child 209]".
- Mainly Norfolk: "Geordie / Georgie".
- Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (EFDSS): "Joan Baez in concert" (catalogue record).
- Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. I".
- Image: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Stag and Does, brush and brown wash over graphite, 1820–73. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.