The Blackest Crow: A Song History

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“The Blackest Crow” is a lyric of parting rather than a story ballad. Its singer, facing separation from a lover, grieves the parting, vows to stay faithful until something impossible happens, such as the blackest crow turning white, and asks the beloved to write. The Traditional Ballad Index files such songs under “My Dearest Dear” and regards them as patchworks of floating verses, with only its opening couplet at all characteristic.[1] Because the verses travel so freely, reference works file it in different places: the Ballad Index lists one “Blackest Crow” text under “My Dearest Dear” (Roud 3601) and another under “Fare You Well, My Own True Love” (Roud 49), while Mainly Norfolk groups recordings of it with “The Turtle Dove” (Roud 422).[1][2][3]

Kawanabe Kyosai painting of a black crow on a plum branch before a pale full moon, with calligraphy at left

Kawanabe Kyōsai, Full Moon with Crow on Plum Branch, 1880s. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The Ballad Index’s earliest date for the family is 1906, a Missouri text titled “Banishment” in H. M. Belden’s collection for the Missouri Folklore Society, and it also cites Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (as “My Dearest Dear”), an Aberdeenshire text in the Greig-Duncan collection, and Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 recording “Little Turtle Dove.”[1] The song was still being sung in Arkansas decades later: the folklorist John Quincy Wolf Jr. recorded Fleecy Fox singing “The Blackest Crow” at Pangburn, Arkansas, on 29 July 1963, noting a related text in Vance Randolph’s collection, and Max Hunter recorded Fleecy and Benson Fox at Leslie, Arkansas, on 18 September 1972.[4][5]

Among old-time musicians, the fiddler Bruce Molsky teaches it in a Peghead Nation lesson, sung over his own fiddling in GDGD tuning, in an arrangement that draws on the North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell.[6] Many revival performers have recorded it, among them Heidi Talbot and Kris Drever on In Love + Light (2008).[3] It appears, as “Blackest Crow, The,” in Stephen Seifert’s mountain dulcimer jam book Join the Jam II.[7]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "My Dearest Dear".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Fare You Well, My Own True Love".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "The Turtle Dove / The Blackest Crow / Ten Thousand Miles (Roud 422)".
  4. Lyon College, John Quincy Wolf Folklore Collection: "The Blackest Crow (I Love You Well)".
  5. Missouri State University, Max Hunter Folk Song Collection: "The Blackest Crow".
  6. Peghead Nation: "Singing and Fiddling: The Blackest Crow, Part 1: Melody".
  7. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".