I'll Give My Love An Apple: A Song History

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"I'll Give My Love an Apple," also printed as "I Will Give My Love an Apple," belongs to the family of the old riddle song best known in America as "The Riddle Song" or "I Gave My Love a Cherry."[1] The Traditional Ballad Index lists the apple-titled texts under that song, gives the family Roud numbers 330 and 36, and traces it to a Middle English lyric of about 1430 in a British Library manuscript.[1] In each version the singer names gifts that seem impossible and is then asked to explain them.[1] Some scholars have regarded the song as a decayed remnant of the Scottish riddling ballad "Captain Wedderburn's Courtship" (Child 46), but the Index argues that, given the song's 1430 date, any borrowing more likely ran the other way, and it sees only a casual connection between the two.[1] It is a different song from "Do You Love an Apple?" (Roud 654), in which a woman stands by a neglectful man, and for which the Index's earliest date is a 1952 recording.[2]

Wood engraving of a boy picking apples from a tree

Winslow Homer, Green Apples, wood engraving, 1868. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Helen Creighton collected it in 1937 from Denis Smith, a retired sea captain at Chezzetcook, Nova Scotia, and published it in Traditional Songs from Nova Scotia (1950); Edith Fowke traces this Canadian text to a riddle song of the fifteenth century.[3] John Langstaff recorded it in 1956, taking it from Cecil Sharp's Novello's School Songs.[4] Cyril Tawney sang a Dorset version, and it gave its name to his 1973 Argo album I Will Give My Love, a collection of traditional love songs from South West England.[4] Ralph Vaughan Williams's arrangement for voice and piano was published by Novello in 1912.[5] In Canada, Godfrey Ridout arranged it in Folk Songs of Eastern Canada (1970), and Jon Vickers recorded that arrangement.[3]

For dulcimer players, Maureen Sellers includes it, with a melody part and an octave harmony part, in Simply Duets, a book of older songs arranged for mountain dulcimer duet, published by Fingers Of Steel.[6]

Our book that contains the song "I'll Give My Love An Apple"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "I Gave My Love a Cherry".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Do You Love an Apple?".
  3. The Canadian Encyclopedia: "I'll Give My Love an Apple".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "I Will Give My Love an Apple".
  5. IMSLP: "I Will Give My Love an Apple (Vaughan Williams, Ralph)".
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Duets".
  7. Image: Winslow Homer, Green Apples, wood engraving, 1868. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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