The Single Sailor: A Song History

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"The Single Sailor" is one of many names for a broken-token ballad that folk song scholars number Laws N42 and Roud 264, indexed by the Traditional Ballad Index as "Pretty Fair Maid" and also known as "The Broken Token."[1] In it a stranger courts a young woman who insists on keeping faith with an absent sweetheart; he suggests the absent man may have been killed, drowned or proved false, she will not give way, and he then produces a token (a locket in the Index's summary, a broken ring in the verse its notes quote) that reveals him as her lost love, now a rich man.[1] The Index gives 1822 as its earliest date and reports it from England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the Bahamas and much of the United States.[1] The "single sailor" wording turns up repeatedly: the Greig-Duncan collection from northeast Scotland holds 26 texts under "The Single Sailor," W. Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs (Edinburgh, 1876) printed a tune called "The Poor and Single Sailor," and the Bodleian's broadside holdings include "Young and Single Sailor."[1]

Sixteenth-century gold twin ring set with a ruby and an emerald, with enamelled shoulders

Unknown maker, Gimmel ring (Twin ring), gold, enamel, rubies and emerald, second half of the 16th century. A sixteenth-century gimmel ring, a betrothal ring made to come apart in two, shown for the ballad's broken-ring token; the ring has no connection to the song.

The song was being sung in the southern mountains in the early twentieth century: Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp printed it as "The Broken Token" in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917), with versions sung in 1916 by Mrs. Mary Sands and Mitchell Wallin at Allanstand, North Carolina, and by Mrs. Jane Gentry at Hot Springs, North Carolina.[2] Sharp's notes point to earlier British printings, among them Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs and a Dublin broadside by Brereton, and to American texts in the Journal of American Folk-Lore and Wyman and Brockway's Lonesome Tunes.[2] Later recordings include Cousin Emmy's "Pretty Fair Miss Out in the Garden" for Decca in 1947, along with versions by Roscoe Holcomb, the New Lost City Ramblers and Daisy Chapman, whose title was "The Poor and Single Sailor."[1]

Aubrey Atwater and Elwood Donnelly recorded "The Single Sailor" for The Boat You Row (2022), their fourteenth album, with Atwater playing mountain dulcimer among other instruments; their version is told by the woman, and a broken ring gives the sailor away.[3] A dulcimer arrangement under the same title, tuned DAD, is part of Atwater's Song By Song, Vol. II, a tablature collection she issues herself, gathering traditional pieces learned from noted performers and writers and giving each its own preferred tuning.[4]

Our book that contains the song "The Single Sailor"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Pretty Fair Maid (The Maiden in the Garden; The Broken Token)".
  2. Internet Archive: "English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians" (Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, 1917).
  3. Atwater-Donnelly: "The Boat You Row".
  4. Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. II".
  5. Image: Unknown maker, Gimmel ring (Twin ring), gold, enamel, rubies and emerald, second half of the 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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