| Clare County Library | Songs of Clare |
| Barb’ry Ellen (Child 84; Roud 54) 
Tom LenihanKnockbrack, Miltown Malbay Recorded 1977
Carroll Mackenzie Collection |
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In Dublin town I was brought up Her name was Barb’ry Ellen. For twelve long months I courted her, How maidens’ minds do alter. I fell sick and very bad, I feel, young man, you’re dying.’ ‘Dying, dear, how can that be? If your very heart was breaking. Do you remember Saturday night, ‘I do remember Saturday night, As a toast to Barb’ry Ellen. As she was in her father’s lawn, Until I gaze upon him. The more she gazed the more she sobbed, False-hearted Barb’ry Ellen. ‘Go home, dear mother, make my bed down, I will die for him tomorrow. Now these couple are dead and gone, And the other in grief and sorrow. |
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| “Probably the most widespread
of all the ballads, this is known throughout the English-speaking world.
Samuel Pepys, in his diary entry for 2nd January 1666 wrote, 'In perfect pleasure I was to hear her' (Mrs Knipp, an actress) 'sing, and especially her little Scotch song of Barbary Allen.' Oliver Goldsmith heard it sung by a dairymaid, Peggy Golden, at Lissoy, near Ballymahon, Co. Westmeath, and wrote in 1765: 'The music of the finest singer is dissonance to what I felt when an old dairymaid sung me into tears with "Johnny Armstrong’s Last Goodnight" or "The Cruelty Of Barbara Allen".' It was first published in Allan Ramsay’s "Tea-Table Miscellany" and has continued to make an appearance in folk song collections since. In William Stenhouse’s notes to the variant in The Scots Musical Museum, he wrote: 'It has been a favourite ballad at every country fire-side in Scotland, time out of memory……… A learned correspondent informs me that he remembers having heard the ballad frequently sung in Dumfriesshire, where, it was said, the catastrophe took place…' Bronson gives around two hundred versions, and ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger edited an LP record containing thirty American recordings. The enduring popularity of the ballad among country singers and a revealing insight into how it was viewed by them, was amply illustrated in an interview with American traditional singer Jean Ritchie who spoke about her work collecting folk songs in Ireland, Scotland and England in the early nineteen fifties. She says: 'I used the song Barbara Allen as a collecting tool because everybody knew it. When I would ask people to sing me some of their old songs they would sometimes sing Does Your Mother Come from Ireland, or something about shamrocks. But if I asked if they knew Barbara Allen, immediately they knew exactly what kind of song I was talking about and they would bring out beautiful old things that matched mine; and were variants of the songs that I knew in Kentucky. It was like coming home'." Reference: |
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