Wee Croodin’ Doo: A Song History
"Wee Croodin' Doo" is a Scottish branch of the ballad that Francis James Child numbered 12, "Lord Randal," for which the Traditional Ballad Index gives an earliest date of 1787 and which it also lists under the title "Bonnie Wee Croodlin Doo."[1] In the familiar form, a young man comes home and answers his mother's questions one by one until he admits that his sweetheart has poisoned him.[1] The Croodlin Doo versions make the victim a small child who has been given a fish by a stepmother or, in some copies, a grandmother; the dog that eats the bones dies, and the child says it will die too.[2] The title is Scots: the Scottish National Dictionary defines the verb "croodle" as to coo, of a dove, and records "croodlin doo" both for the wood pigeon and, figuratively, as a term of endearment.[3]
Wenceslaus Hollar, Eight Pigeons (or Doves) in a Farmyard near a Coup, a Dovecote in the Background, etching, 1654–58. Pigeons and doves in a farmyard, etched by Wenceslaus Hollar, shown for the Scots "croodlin doo" of the title, a cooing dove or wood pigeon; the etching has no connection to the song.
Child printed this form in the first part of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in 1882, drawing on Motherwell's manuscript, on Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1842 and 1870 editions), on the Buchan and Kinloch manuscripts, and on a manuscript copied by a granddaughter of Alexander Fraser-Tytler.[2] He passed on Walter Scott's suggestion that the ballad's young hunter may have been replaced by a child poisoned by a stepmother, to make the song more appealing in the nursery, an idea Child said "seems very reasonable."[2] He also set the Croodlin Doo group beside similar German ballads, among them "Grossmutter Schlangenköchin," first printed in 1802 in Clemens Brentano's novel Godwi.[2] Evelyn K. Wells described "The Croodin Doo," which she traced from Scotland by way of Yorkshire and Lancashire, as Lord Rendal "reduced to the nursery level."[4] John Langstaff recorded "The Croodin Doo" for Tradition Records in 1956, and Sandy Paton's "Wee Croodlin' Doo" appeared on the Elektra album The Many Sides of Sandy Paton in 1959, with notes by Kenneth S. Goldstein describing it as a Glasgow version of his own day and naming a stepmother as the poisoner.[4]
Shelley Stevens includes it, as one of two Scottish pieces and played with a capo at the first fret, in Baker's Dozen #6: World Music, a round-the-world set of thirteen mountain dulcimer arrangements in DAD tuning from eight countries, given in standard notation, tablature and lyrics, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Lord Randal [Child 12]".
- Project Gutenberg: "Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 1" (No. 12, Lord Randal).
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language: "Croodle v.2, n.2" (Scottish National Dictionary).
- Mainly Norfolk: "Lord Randall / Henry My Son / What Had You for Supper / Poisoned Peas / Buried in Kilkenny".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #6: World Music".
- Image: Wenceslaus Hollar, Eight Pigeons (or Doves) in a Farmyard near a Coup, a Dovecote in the Background, etching, 1654–58. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.