If I Were A Blackbird: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"If I Were a Blackbird" is the lament of a young woman courted and then deserted by a sailor, who wishes she could become a blackbird and follow him; the Traditional Ballad Index lists its author as unknown, files it as Roud 387, and gives 1906 as its earliest date.^[1] An Index editor observes that it is pieced together from floating verses also found in songs such as "The Wagoner's Lad," but that this particular combination turns up so widely that it counts as a song in its own right.^[1] Mainly Norfolk traces the 1906 date to George Gardiner's collecting in Hampshire, and lists later versions from English Gypsy and other traditional singers and from Scotland, where Blanche Wood of Portnockie sang a version for Alan Lomax in 1951.^[2] The Index also cites Irish printings in Sam Henry's Songs of the People and Colm O Lochlainn's Irish Street Ballads,^[1] the latter published in Dublin in 1939, according to the Joe Heaney Archive.^[3] Where the song began is therefore an open question: album notes reprinted on Mainly Norfolk call it popular with English, Irish and Scots singers alike, suggest that the closeness of collected texts points to a printed broadside that no one has yet traced, and in one case wonder whether it is a fairly recent composition.^[2] It is a different piece from "The Blackbird," a Jacobite song that Grattan Flood dated to about 1707 (other sources place its words earlier), whose melody lives on in Irish tradition as a slow air and set dance.^[4]

In Ireland it is closely tied to Delia Murphy (1902–1971) of County Mayo, whom, according to the Connaught Telegraph, it helped make famous; she learned it as a child from Tom Maughan, a Traveller about her own age, at a time when her father let Travellers camp on his estate.^[5] Notes reprinted on Mainly Norfolk say her 1939 recording was often played on the radio, as was the whistler Ronnie Ronalde's in the 1950s, and that most singers since seem to have been shaped by her version; a verse naming Donnybrook Fair is taken as a sign of the recorded versions, while some traditional singers held that their own versions were older.^[2] In 2007 the national libraries of Ireland and Australia gave the song's title to an exhibition on Murphy and her husband, the diplomat Thomas J. Kiernan, a title that, Tinteán notes, pointed chiefly to her singing career.^[6] Other recordings include Albert "Diddy" Cook singing it with a Suffolk pub chorus in the late 1930s, and Silly Wizard's 1981 adaptation, for which Andy M. Stewart wrote new verses and turned the story around so that the woman is the one who sails away.^[2] Joe Heaney, a singer from the Carna tradition, recorded it at the University of Washington in 1982.^[3]

Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy include it, in DAD tuning, among the 31 tunes of From Ditties To Dirges, which draws mostly on centuries-old melodies from the British Isles, from sea shanties and courting songs to laments, and sets nearly all of them for solo mountain dulcimer in tablature, notation and chord names, adding lyric sheets for singers and historical notes.^[7]

Sources

1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "I Am a Young Maiden (If I Were a Blackbird)".
2. Mainly Norfolk: "If I Was a Blackbird / I Am a Young Maiden".
3. Joe Heaney Archive (Cartlanna Sheosaimh Uí Éanaí): "If I were a Blackbird".
4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Blackbird (1) (The)".
5. Connaught Telegraph: "Delia Murphy – the Blackbird from Roundfort".
6. Tinteán: "Delia Murphy 'Ballad Queen' 1902-1971".
7. Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
8. Image: Winslow Homer, A Fisherman's Daughter, watercolor and gouache, 1873. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song