Loving Hannah: A Song History

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"Loving Hannah" is one title of a widely traveled song of slighted love that folk-song indexes file under Roud 454, together with titles such as "Farewell Ballymoney," "Lovely Molly" and "Going to Mass Last Sunday."[1][2] In the Traditional Ballad Index's summary, a young man watches his sweetheart turn away from him and sets off for America; the index finds the song in Ireland, Britain, Canada, Australia and several regions of the United States, and its earliest dated version there is from 1866.[1] Its tune and setting change a great deal from one version to the next, and an index editor counts "Handsome Molly" as a relative that now circulates on its own.[1]

Engraving of emigrants huddled on the deck of a ship

Arthur Boyd Houghton, Steerage Emigrants, wood engraving from The Graphic, 1870. Emigrants at sea, shown for the song family's passage from Britain and Ireland to America; it has no connection to the song.

Jean Ritchie printed her family's version in her 1965 book Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, recalling that it was sung by the older men of the Ritchie family, among them her father Balis, rather than by the women.[2] When Alan Lomax hosted a song swap at his London flat in 1953, the singer Margaret Barry sang a fragment of "Going to Mass Last Sunday," and Ritchie recognized it at once as an ancestor of her "Lovin' Hannah."[2] From Ritchie the song passed to Jeannie Robertson: Sandy Paton, who heard Robertson sing it in Aberdeen in 1958, reported that she had learned it from a record Ritchie had given her, and according to Paton nearly every version sung under the "Loving Hannah" title descends from Robertson's.[1][2]

Recordings under that title include Sandy and Caroline Paton's (1966), a 1966 demo by Shirley Collins, and later versions by Whippersnapper, Jim Causley, Siobhan Miller and Bella Hardy.[2] Aubrey Atwater includes it, tuned DAD, in Song By Song, Vol. II, a downloadable book of dulcimer tablature issued under her own name, where many of the songs come with their lyrics.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Loving Hannah"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Farewell Ballymoney (Loving Hannah; Lovely Molly)".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "Meeting Is a Pleasure / Courting Is a Pleasure / Handsome Molly / Loving Hannah".
  3. Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. II".
  4. Image: Arthur Boyd Houghton, Steerage Emigrants, wood engraving from The Graphic, 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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