Glenlogie: A Song History
“Glenlogie,” also called “Jean o Bethelnie,” is number 238 in Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads and number 101 in the Roud Folk Song Index.[1][2] As Child summarizes the story, Jean, a girl in her mid-teens, loses her heart to Glenlogie the moment she sees him and declares it, but he answers that he is already pledged elsewhere.[1] Lovesick and ready to die, she will not hear of another match; a letter from the family chaplain describing her plight changes Glenlogie’s mind, and he hurries to Bethelnie to marry her.[1] Child printed nine versions; the earliest to be written down, communicated by R. Lambe in 1768, is in the Percy Papers, and others come from the Skene manuscript (recited 1802–3), Sharpe’s Ballad Book of 1823 and Peter Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland.[1][3]
Balmoral Castle, Balmoral, Scotland, photochrom, ca. 1890–1906. An Aberdeenshire castle, shown for its setting; it has no connection to the ballad.
The song is a ballad of North-East Scotland; singers’ notes place Bethelnie northwest of Oldmeldrum in Aberdeenshire.[2] The collector Gavin Greig is reported to have counted it among the most popular ballads of that region.[2] Tradition connects the story with Jean Meldrum and Sir George Gordon of Glenlogie, though the Traditional Ballad Index warns that this history may be merely alleged.[3] The heroine’s surname differs between texts: she is a Gordon in one of Child’s versions and a Melville in several others.[1]
John Strachan of Fyvie sang “Glenlogie” for Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson on 16 July 1951, and in 1956 Henderson recorded it from John Adams, a joiner at the Glenlivet distillery.[2] Later recordings include Ewan MacColl’s in 1964, Shirley Collins’s in 1970, sung to a melody she composed because she had no tune for the words, Dick Gaughan’s in 1978 and Old Blind Dogs’ in the early 1990s.[2] Performers’ notes often dwell on how it ends, with the band Back of the Moon calling it “One of Scotland’s few ballads with a happy ending.”[2] Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy include “Glenlogie,” in DAD tuning, in From Ditties To Dirges, a collection of ballads, laments and other centuries-old songs, mostly from the British Isles, nearly all arranged for solo mountain dulcimer.[4]
Sources
- Project Gutenberg: "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume IV," ed. Francis James Child (No. 238, "Glenlogie, or, Jean o Bethelnie").
- Mainly Norfolk: "Glenlogie / Jean of Bethelnie".
- Traditional Ballad Index: "Glenlogie, or, Jean o Bethelnie [Child 238]".
- Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
- Image: Balmoral Castle, Balmoral, Scotland, photochrom, ca. 1890–1906. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.