I thought it might be an interesting exercise to record several completely disparate versions of the same song, and as I played a version of “The Cruel Mother” at the Traditional Song Session at the Midland Arts Centre last Thursday, May 3rd, I decided to go for that one.

It’s an unpleasant little tale, that’s for certain. Child records 13 different versions, but the plot is always broadly the same. A woman has twins (sometimes triplets) out of wedlock and murders them, and then is usually haunted by a vision of them playing ball. They often tell her she’s going to hell.

This first version of the words, and tune, come from the book “Songs of the Midlands”, edited by Roy Palmer, and now out of print. It was collected from Mrs. Cecilia Costello in 1951 by Marie Slocombe and P.S. Shaw, in Birmingham.

This performance is recorded on a 3-string appalachian mountain dulcimer, tuned D-D-c, and with a capo on the first fret, carefully avoiding the F-naturals that that tuning provides on the melody string!

Download The Cruel Mother (4.6 MB)

The text (which I’ve corrupted slightly while singing it) is:

THE CRUEL MOTHER

There was a lady that lived in York
All alone and aloney-o
She proved with child by her own father’s clerk
Down by the greenwood sidey-o

As she was walking down her father’s lawn
She thought three times that her back would be broke

As she was walking down her father’s lawn
She says “Honourable Mary, pity me”

Oh she was walking down her father’s lawn
Where her fine sons they were born

She pulled out her long penknife
And there she took away their three lives

Years went by and one summer’s morn
She saw three boys they were playing bat and ball

“O my fine boys if you were mine,
I’d dress you up in silk so fine.”

“O mother dear when we were yours,
You did not dress us in silk so fine.”

“You pulled out your long penknife
And there you took away our three lives.”

“O my fine boys what will become of me?”
“You’ll be seven long years a bird in a tree.”

“You’ll be seven long years a tongue in a bell,
And you’ll be seven long years a porter in hell.”