Lord Franklin: A Song History
"Lord Franklin," also known as "Lady Franklin's Lament," mourns Sir John Franklin, lost while seeking the Northwest Passage: a sailor dreams he hears Lady Franklin grieving for her husband and willing to give a fortune to learn what became of him.[1] Franklin's ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, left Greenhithe, near London, on May 19, 1845, and were sighted by whalers in Baffin Bay that July; Franklin died on June 11, 1847, and the remaining men deserted the ships off King William Island in April 1848.[2] Jane Franklin pressed the Admiralty for searches and helped pay to fit out five search ships between 1850 and 1857, and Leopold McClintock's voyage in the yacht Fox at last brought back documents showing what had happened to the crews.[3] Erebus was found on September 2, 2014, and Terror about two years later, and the wrecks now form a national historic site managed jointly by Inuit and Parks Canada.[2][4]
Currier & Ives, Nipped in the Ice, hand-colored lithograph, 1877–94. A ship trapped in Arctic ice, shown for the fate of Franklin's ships; it does not show his expedition.
The Traditional Ballad Index, which files the song as Laws K9 and Roud 487, calls it the "chief musical relic" of the disaster, noting that most Franklin songs of the 1840s and 1850s circulated as broadsides and that this appears to be the only one to have survived in tradition.[1] The earliest date the Index gives is 1861, for a text in the Journal of the Morning Light, and it suggests that the broadside versions probably date from about 1850 to 1853.[1] Versions have turned up in Newfoundland, the Maritimes and Ontario, in Scotland and Ireland, and in the northeastern United States, under titles such as "Franklin's Crew" and "Franklin the Brave."[1]
A. L. Lloyd sang it, with Alf Edwards on concertina, on the Topic album The Singing Sailor in the mid-1950s, and Paul Clayton, Martin Carthy and Pentangle were among those who recorded it afterward.[5] Mainly Norfolk says that Bob Dylan learned it from Carthy and based "Bob Dylan's Dream" on it,[5] and a Contemporary Musicians profile of Carthy adds that Dylan heard him sing it in London and reworked the melody for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.[6] Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy's From Ditties To Dirges includes it in DAD tuning; most of the book's arrangements are at intermediate level, with chord names alongside standard notation and tab, and it adds tips on playing and performing to its historical notes.[7]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Lady Franklin's Lament (The Sailor's Dream) [Laws K9]".
- Canadian Museum of History: "Franklin Chronological Timeline".
- Royal Museums Greenwich: "Jane Franklin: a remarkable woman".
- Parks Canada: "Wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site".
- Mainly Norfolk: "Lady Franklin's Lament / Lord Franklin".
- Encyclopedia.com: "Carthy, Martin".
- Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
- Image: Currier & Ives, Nipped in the Ice, hand-colored lithograph, 1877–94. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.