Singing to the Walls_04 The Banks of Sweet primroses

Firstly it was the melody, or air that caught my attention with this short ballad. The Martin Carthy version was my introduction to the song. Fairport Convention have a jaunty, psychedelic take. Luke kelly unsurprisingly does a very fine job and Louis Killen offers an equally beautiful, but less grandiose version with his concertina.

The story is one we see visited in many trad songs. A man goes out one morning to walk and on his rambles sees a woman who beguiles him. He moves towards her and announces his intentions. The woman, already in some form of distress, is wary of this young suitor. She fends him off calling him a 'false deceiver'. He is slighted like many young men in the folk song; often viewed as untrustworthy in matters of the heart. it's not clear to me whether she has previous experience with this particular admirer. Perhaps her proclamation of 'It's you has caused my poor heart to wander' is directed more generally at impulsive gambles on love or lust. She has been hurt before. She is wounded and resigns herself to 'go down to some lonesome valley, where no man on earth shall me find'. This faraway valley can be found in other songs of unrequited emotions, namely in the ballad 'Peggy Gordon' thought to have originated in Nova Scotia. There are what is know as 'floating verses' in the tradition where a line or sometimes an entire verse is grafted into another song of similar sentiment. This particular verse, to me, is quite unusual. There is a mystery to its imagery. I wondered why the 'little birds do change their voices'. What might this valley represent? is it a physical place or perhaps somewhere else, another plane of awareness, a subconscious landscape.

The final verse ends on a somewhat brighter note. it tells us that often an event that cuts us down at the time of its happening is often a blessing. The dark times, when we look back on them, can be viewed as necessary diversions on our path towards the light.