Lavender Blue: A Song History

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The earliest version found in the sources consulted here is a London broadside ballad, Diddle, Diddle, or The Kind Country Lovers, catalogued as Roud 3483.[1] Surviving copies come from the 1670s and early 1680s: the Traditional Ballad Index points to a Bodleian printing of 1674–1679, while the English Broadside Ballad Archive dates a copy now in Glasgow to 1681–1684.[1][2] That later sheet was licensed by the press censor Roger L’Estrange and directs it to be sung to a tune called “Lavender Green.”[2] The broadside was a grown-up courting song, in which a young man urges his sweetheart to follow the example of another country pair who had already gone further than courting.[1]

Walter Crane's The Baby's Opera open to its colorful title pages

Walter Crane, The Baby's Opera, A Book of Old Rhymes with New Dresses, illustrations in color wood engraving, 1877. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). The book includes “Lavender’s Blue”; the spread shown here is its opening, not that song's page.

The song also survives as the nursery rhyme “Lavender’s Blue,” the title under which several collections print it, among them the Opies’ Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.[1] Walter Crane included it in The Baby’s Opera, his colour-printed book of old rhymes with music by early composers, engraved and printed by Edmund Evans.[3] One library catalog dates an American edition of that book to about 1877.[4]

A popular modern form came from Disney’s So Dear to My Heart (1948), where Larry Morey wrote new words and Eliot Daniel received the music credit for a melody drawn from the old folk song.[1] As “Lavender Blue,” it was one of the five nominees for the Academy Award for best song at the ceremony honoring 1949 films.[5] Burl Ives sang it in the film, and Sammy Turner had a hit with it in 1959.[1]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index (Fresno State): "Lavender Blue".
  2. English Broadside Ballad Archive, UC Santa Barbara: "Diddle, Diddle, or, The Kind Country Lovers" (EBBA 31730).
  3. Project Gutenberg: "The Baby's Opera" by Walter Crane.
  4. University of Missouri Libraries Special Collections: "The baby's opera".
  5. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: "The 22nd Academy Awards (1950)".