When I Was A Fair Maid: A Song History

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The title "When I Was a Fair Maid" is one of the names attached to a ballad that scholars file as "The Soldier Maid" or "The Female Drummer" (Roud 226), in which a young woman leaves her parents, enlists, does well in the ranks, and is eventually found out.[1] Unlike most songs of women in disguise, it gives her no sweetheart to follow; Steve Roud observes that she seems to have joined up "for the sheer hell of it."[2] Printed versions set her story at the siege of Valenciennes in 1793, but Roud says the versions taken down from singers have all left that episode out.[2] Sources differ on the earliest print: Roud points to a London broadside by Evans from about 1810, while A. L. Lloyd cited a Bodleian sheet of around 1790.[2] Mike Yates suggests the Evans sheet could have drawn on the 1809 memoir of Mary Anne Talbot, who had served under the name John Taylor, though he thinks it more likely the sheet was printed to cash in on the interest in female soldiers that her book aroused.[2]

Seated portrait photograph of Frances Clayton in a Union army uniform jacket, holding a cap on her knee.

Samuel Masury, Frances Clalin Clayton, albumen silver print, 1864. Frances Clalin Clayton, photographed in 1864 in a Union army uniform, shown for the ballad's heroine who enlists; the photograph has no connection to the song.

The ballad was well established in Scotland: Gavin Greig described it as well known in Aberdeenshire, and the Greig-Duncan collection prints six texts under "The Soldier Maid."[1][2] The Edinburgh printer J. Morren issued it as "The Female Drummer" on a sheet of four songs.[3] Tobar an Dualchais, the online archive of Scottish recordings, holds a brief fragment of it recorded in 1960.[4] Peter Kennedy and Hamish Henderson recorded Margaret Jeffrey in the Blairgowrie berryfields singing it as "When I Was a Young Maid" in the mid-1950s (the notes consulted give both 1955 and 1956), and in England Harry Cox sang it for Ewan MacColl at his home in Catfield, Norfolk, in 1955.[2]

The Traditional Ballad Index, citing an earlier tally of just fifteen texts from tradition, finds the ballad less common among traditional singers than in the folk revival, where it has been widely sung.[1] Steeleye Span, who learned it from the Watersons, recorded it on Please to See the King in 1971; the Bothy Band performed it as "When I Was a Fair Maid" at a Swiss festival in 1977, and Jackie Oates recorded it under that title in 2022, learned from Margaret Jeffrey's singing.[2] A mountain dulcimer setting under this title, in DAA tuning, appears in Aubrey Atwater's Song By Song, Vol. I, a book issued under her own name that also covers old-time banjo and Irish tin whistle and supplies each of its 72 pieces as a separate PDF alongside the complete edition.[5]

Our book that contains the song "When I Was A Fair Maid"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Soldier Maid".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Female Drummer / The Pretty Drummer Boy".
  3. Wayne State University, Warrior Women Project: "The Female Drummer".
  4. Tobar an Dualchais: "The Soldier Maid".
  5. Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. I".
  6. Image: Samuel Masury, Frances Clalin Clayton, albumen silver print, 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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