While Roving On A Winter's Night: A Song History

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"While Roving On A Winter's Night" is one name for a song of parting lovers that the Traditional Ballad Index files under "My Dearest Dear" (Roud 3601), giving "A-Roving on a Winter's Night" as its alternate title.[1] The Index calls it "basically a lyric piece assembled from all sorts of floating materials," with only its first two lines distinctive to it.[1] It reports the song from Aberdeenshire in Scotland and from the southern United States, Appalachia included, and gives 1906 as its earliest date, citing a Missouri Folk-Lore Society collection.[1] Cecil Sharp printed a version titled "My Dearest Dear" in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.[1] In notes reproduced by Mainly Norfolk, Mike Yates writes that Sharp took down a closely similar version, under that title, from Mary Sands on 5 August 1916.[2] Sands, of Madison County, North Carolina, first met Sharp on July 31, 1916, and sang him 25 songs over the days that followed.[3]

Photograph of a snowy field with a dark stream winding through it, bare trees and houses on the ridge beyond

Clarence H. White, Winter Landscape, platinum print, c. 1900. A winter scene by day rather than by night, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

In Kentucky, a 1937 recording of W. M. Keen singing a lyric song catalogued as "My Dearest Dear" (also "Time Draws Near, My Dearest Dear"), made at Hyden in Leslie County, is held in the Alan and Elizabeth Lomax Kentucky collection; the catalogue entry does not say which verses he sang.[4] Yates adds that Mark Wilson has found the song popular in Kentucky and the Ozarks.[2] Mainly Norfolk places the "roving" form among the songs of the Watson family of Deep Gap, North Carolina, and notes a 1964 recording by Doc Watson's cousin Dolly Greer.[2] Her performance came out in 1977 on The Watson Family Tradition, an LP drawn from recordings Ralph Rinzler and Daniel Seeger made in 1964 and 1965.[5] Watson himself recorded it for his 1966 Vanguard album Home Again!, where the track is listed as "Winter's Night," with a writing credit to Dolly Greer and Doc Watson.[6][7] The Ballad Index observes that the version Watson sings pairs the winter's-night verse with lines from "My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose."[1]

The Index also cross-references it to "Fare You Well, My Own True Love," a song whose alternate titles include "Turtle Dove."[1] Mainly Norfolk's list of recordings runs from Shirley Collins in 1964 to the Furrow Collective in 2023, and at least two of those singers say they learned it from Doc Watson.[2] Aubrey Atwater includes it, in double C tuning, in the old-time banjo section of Song By Song, Vol. I, which its listing describes as "old-time favorites for mountain dulcimer, banjo, whistle, guitar and voice."[8]

Our book that contains the song "While Roving On A Winter's Night"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "My Dearest Dear".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "A-Roving on a Winter's Night / Dearest Dear / Every Day Is Three".
  3. North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources: "Mary Sands 1872-1949 (P-102)".
  4. Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings: "My Dearest Dear".
  5. Mainly Norfolk: "The Watson Family Tradition".
  6. AllMusic: "Home Again! - Doc Watson".
  7. Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Catalogue: "Home again! / Doc Watson".
  8. Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. I".
  9. Image: Clarence H. White, Winter Landscape, platinum print, c. 1900. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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