Pretty Peggy O: A Song History
"Pretty Peggy-O" is an American title for the song generally sung in Scotland as "The Bonnie Lass o' Fyvie," which the Traditional Ballad Index lists as Roud 545.[1][2] In outline, a troop of soldiers arrives in town and its captain courts Peggy; she refuses to become a soldier's wife, and after orders take him away he dies of love for her.[1] The Index's earliest date is a Catnach broadside printed before 1839, and Steve Roud, quoted on Mainly Norfolk, notes that broadsides usually titled it "Pretty Peggy of Derby" and that the two earliest with imprints, from Pitts and Catnach, probably date from the 1820s.[1][2] Roud nevertheless judges the song "something of a mystery," observing that even the broadside text seems incomplete.[2] William Christie recorded an informant's belief that it was composed after a company of dragoons escorted men involved in the Irish rebellion of 1798 to Fort George, though other notes gathered on Mainly Norfolk caution that the song may not record any real event.[1][2]
Hill and Adamson, The Porthole / Sergeant and Private of the 42nd Gordon Highlanders, Edinburgh Castle, salted paper print from paper negative, 1843–47. Scottish soldiers of the 1840s, shown for the soldiers of the song; it has no connection to the song.
Roud describes the song as collected frequently in Scotland, and the Greig-Duncan collection holds more than twenty versions of it.[1][2] Christie printed a tune for it, learned from his grandmother, in his Traditional Ballad Airs of 1876.[1][2] Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson recorded John Strachan singing it at Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, on 16 July 1951.[2] In the United States the Index lists it from Appalachia, the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, the Southeast and the South, with texts in Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina folklore, and Belden's collection for the Missouri Folklore Society.[1]
During the folk revival Bob Dylan sang "Pretty Peggy-O" on his 1962 debut album, Bob Dylan, having first performed it at Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York on 4 November 1961.[3][4] In Britain, Martin Carthy sang it as "Handsome Polly-O" on his 1972 album Shearwater, one of many revival recordings of the song.[2] In Simply Old Time Dulcimer, a tablature book of traditional old-time pieces with an MP3 demonstration of each of its 29 tunes, Don Pedi sets "Pretty Peggy O" in DGD tuning.[5]
Sources
- Traditional Ballad Index: "Bonnie Lass of Fyvie, The (Pretty Peggy-O)".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Bonnie Lass o' Fyvie".
- Bob Dylan official site: "Pretty Peggy-O".
- Bob Dylan official site: "Carnegie Chapter Hall, Nov 4, 1961".
- Don Pedi: "Simply Old Time Dulcimer".
- Image: Hill and Adamson, The Porthole / Sergeant and Private of the 42nd Gordon Highlanders, Edinburgh Castle, salted paper print from paper negative, 1843–47. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.