Lambs on the Green Hills: A Song History
"The Lambs on the Green Hills" is the Irish form of a forsaken-lover song that English singers usually call "The Week Before Easter" and Scots singers "The False Bride," catalogued together as Roud 154.[1][2] Its narrator has lost his sweetheart to another man yet still turns up at the wedding; nothing his friends do lifts his gloom, and he ends hoping that death will let him forget her.[2] The Traditional Ballad Index traces it to a broadside that appears to be the one entered at the Stationers' Register in March 1675 as The Forlorn Lover, and John White of Newcastle printed another edition during the reign of James II (1685-1688).[2][1]
William Holman Hunt, On the Hill Side (Our English Coasts, 1852), from The Art Journal, etching and engraving on chine collé, 1877. Sheep on a green hillside, shown for the song's title; it has no connection to the song.
The Irish title comes from Colm Ó Lochlainn, who printed the song as "The Lambs on the Green Hills" in Irish Street Ballads (1939), having got it in 1915 from a Mrs Reddin of Dublin.[1][3] The Johnstons recorded it on a 1968 album for Transatlantic, and that record seems to have carried it to County Clare singers: Ollie Conway, taped in a Mullagh bar in September 1973 for the Carroll Mackenzie Collection, said he learned it from the group's album, and Mick Flynn, whose version gave its title to a 1978 Topic LP recorded by Roly Brown, probably did too.[3][4][1] Brown thought the song had been given a real lift by its appearance in Ó Lochlainn's book.[4] Across the Atlantic, Kenneth Peacock collected Newfoundland versions whose tunes he preferred to Ó Lochlainn's, which he likened to "a professional parlour tune."[3]
It is one of the songs in From Ditties To Dirges, Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy's mountain dulcimer book, which comes as a 101-page PDF with MP3 demo tracks and a song sheet for most of its pieces; their arrangement is in DAD tuning.[5]
Sources
- Mainly Norfolk: "The False Bride / The Week Before Easter / The Lambs on the Green Hills".
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "False Bride, The (The Week Before Easter; I Once Loved a Lass)".
- Clare County Library: "The Lambs on the Green Hills" (Ollie Conway, Carroll Mackenzie Collection).
- Topic Records: "The Lambs on the Green Hills" (TSDL369 booklet notes by Roly Brown).
- Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
- Image: William Holman Hunt, On the Hill Side (Our English Coasts, 1852), from The Art Journal, etching and engraving on chine collé, 1877. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.