Skin And Bones: A Song History

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"Skin and Bones" is a sung ghost story: a gaunt old woman goes to church, comes upon a corpse, and asks whether she will look the same once she is dead, and the answer, given in different versions by a parson or even a clock, ends the song with her scream, her death, or both.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index dates it at least to 1810, in a revised edition of Gammer Gurton's Garland, and it was printed again in Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England in 1843.[1][2] The Roud index, where it is number 501, holds more than sixty sources, and Mainly Norfolk links the song to "Death and the Lady," a subject that European artists returned to from the Middle Ages on.[2][3] Collectors found it in England and across much of the United States, from Vermont and Ohio to North Carolina, Tennessee and the Missouri Ozarks.[1]

Woodcut of two skeletons leading a bent old woman with a cane, one playing a stringed instrument

Hans Holbein the Younger, Dance of Death: The Old Woman, woodcut, c. 1526. Death leading an old woman away, a memento mori shown for the song's churchyard ghost story; the woodcut has no connection to the song.

In the twentieth century Jean Ritchie of Viper, Kentucky, printed it in Singing Family of the Cumberlands and in Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, and recorded it for Elektra in 1952 on an LP of songs from her Kentucky mountain family.[1][2][4] The CDSS feature includes a video of her singing it to dulcimer, describes how its sudden ending startled children into a scream and then a fit of giggles, and tells of a radio engineer who flung off his headphones, after which she gave sound crews advance notice.[2] Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger recorded it in 1961, Cyril Tawney recorded a Devon version from Molly Spooner of Yelverton in 1964, and Eliza Carthy took it up in 2019, while Raffi's recordings introduced it to several generations of children.[2][3] The Country Dance and Song Society has featured it as an October song, calling it "Perfect Hallowe'en musical fare."[2]

For dulcimer players, Aubrey Atwater gives "Skin and Bones" a DAC-tuned setting in Song By Song, Vol. I, her own publication, which gathers mountain dulcimer, old-time banjo and tin whistle pieces along with lyric-and-chord songs and comes with each of its 72 titles as a separate PDF.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Skin And Bones"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Skin and Bones (The Skin and Bones Lady)".
  2. Country Dance and Song Society: "October 2016: Skin and Bones".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "Lady All Skin and Bone".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "Jean Ritchie Singing the Traditional Songs of Her Traditional Kentucky Mountain Family".
  5. Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. I".
  6. Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, Dance of Death: The Old Woman, woodcut, c. 1526. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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