I Wonder When I Shall Be Married: A Song History
"I Wonder When I Shall Be Married" is the lament of a young woman who fears her looks are fading before any suitor has appeared, even though her parents stand ready with a dowry; folklorists file it as Roud 818.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index suggests it probably grew out of a British broadside titled "The Maiden's Sad Complaint for Want of a Husband," and it indexes the song apart from British versions because those often end with the woman finding a husband.[1] A London broadside by that name, signed with the initials L. W. and naming its tune as the new West Country tune or "Hogh when shall I be married?", is dated by the Wing catalogue to between 1674 and 1679.[2]
Charles-Melchior Descourtis and Nicolas Antoine Taunay, Village Wedding, lavis-manner color engraving and etching, 1785. A French village wedding, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
The Ballad Index gives its earliest date as 1923, credited to Cox, whose text appears as "Old Maid's Song" in a West Virginia collection; it adds that Cox's text actually came from Kentucky and nearly matches the Ritchie family's version.[1] The notes to the Folkways album The Ritchie Family of Kentucky (1958), on which Jean and Edna Ritchie sing it unaccompanied, say the family got it through the older Ritchie sisters, who most likely learned it from fellow students at a settlement school in Hindman or Pine Mountain, and that around Viper it came to be called "the Ritchie Old Maids' Song."[3] In 2023 the folklorist Derek Piotr recorded the writer Roxana Robinson, who had learned the song from her own family in Pine Mountain and sings it to a different tune.[1][4]
Aubrey Atwater includes it, with lyrics and chord symbols, in Song By Song, Vol. I, a collection of old-time songs and tunes for mountain dulcimer, banjo, whistle, guitar and voice.[5]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "I Wonder When I Shall Be Married".
- Oxford Text Archive: "The maidens sad complaint for want of a husband".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "The Ritchie Family of Kentucky" (liner notes, FA 2316).
- Country Dance & Song Society: "February 2024: I Wonder When I Shall Be Married".
- Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. I".
- Image: Charles-Melchior Descourtis and Nicolas Antoine Taunay, Village Wedding, lavis-manner color engraving and etching, 1785. The Cleveland Museum of Art.