Farewell Angelina & Farewell To Tarwathie
Bob Dylan recorded "Farewell Angelina " in January 1965. It was not used for Bringing It All Back Home and only released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1 - 3 in 1991. Dylan gave the song to Joan Baez who recorded it in 1965 for her LP of the same title (Vanguard VSD 90-200 )
The melody of "Farewell Angelina" is borrowed from "Farewell To Tarwathie", the song of a whaler from Tarwathie (Aberdeenshire) who is about to set out for Greenland. It is easy to see that the lyrics also offered Dylan a good starting point for his own surreal Farewell song. .
Farewell to Tarwathie, adieu Mormond Hill
And the dear land o' Crimond, I'll bid you fareweel
I'm bound out for Greenland and ready to sail
In hopes to find riches in hunting the whale
Adieu to my comrades, for awhile we must part
And likewise the dear lass that fair won my heart
The cold ice of Greenland, my love will not chill
And the longer my absence, more loving she'll feel
Our ship is well rigged and she's ready to sail
Our crew, they are anxious to follow the whale
Where the icebergs do float and the stormy winds blow
Where the land and the ocean are covered with snow
The cold coast of Greenland is barren and bare
No seed time nor harvest is ever known there
And the birds here sing sweetly on mountain and dale
But there isn't a birdie to sing tae the whale
There is no habitation for a man to live there
And the king of that country is the fierce Greenland bear
And there will be no temptation to tarry long there
Wi' our ship bumper full, we will homeward repair
"Farewell To Tarwathie" was first recorded by A. L. Lloyd for the LP Thar She Blows! (Riverside RLP 12-635, 1956) which was reissued in the 60s in the USA on Whaling Ballads (Washington WLP 724). At the moment the song is available on A.L. Lloyd, Leviathan! - Ballads And Songs Of The Wailing Trade (Topic TSCD 497, 1967 &1998; here on iTunes ). Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger printed it in 1960 in their important and influential collection The Singing Island. A Collection of English and Scots Folksongs and it was also included in McColls Folk Songs and Ballads of Scotland (Oak Publication, 1965) although the latter obviously postdates Dylan's recording.
According to the notes in The Singing Island Lloyd had learned it from "John Sinclair, a native of Ballater [Aberdeenshire], in Durban, South Africa, 1938". The melody is a variant of a well tune known since the 19th century that was - in different variations - used for songs like:
- "Wagoner's Lad" (see Traditional Ballad Index )
- "Pretty Saro" (see Traditional Ballad Index )
- "Green Bushes" (see Traditional Ballad Index ; John McCormack's beautiful version recorded in 1941 is available on YouTube )
- "Rye Whiskey" (see Traditional Ballad Index ; see Lomax, American Ballads And Folk Songs )
In fact the melody applied by Lloyd is nearly identical to the one used by Pete Seeger for his version of "Wagoner's Lad (Fare You Well Polly") recorded in 1954 for Frontier Ballads (Folkways 05003, includes also "Rye Whiskey"). The lyrics are an edited version of a text published by Gavin Greig 1909 in his column "Folk Songs Of The North East" in the BuchanObserver (Roud ID S205060 ). He had collected it from one John Milne from Maud, Aberdeenshire in 1908.
1 Farewell to Tarwathie, adieu Mormond Hill
Dear land of my fathers, I bid you farewell
I'm bound for Greenland and ready to sail
In hopes to find riches in hunting the whale.
2 Adieu to my comrades, a while we must part
Likewise the dear girlie, who has won my heart
The cold ice on Greenland my love will not chill
The longer my absence, the stronger love's thrill.
3 Awhile I must leave you and go to the sea
Wish luck to the bonnie ship that I'm going wi'
And when I am sailing upon the wide main
Be cheerful and happy till I come again.
4 Our ship she is well rigged, and ready to sail
Our crew they are anxious to follow the whale
Where the icebergs float, and the stormy winds blow
Where the land and the ocean is covered with snow.
5 The cold land of Greenland is barren and bare
No seed time or harvest is ever known there
The birds here sing sweetly on mountain and dale
But there's nae a birdie to sing to the whale.
6 There's no habitation for man to live there
The king of that country's the fierce Greenland bear.
There'll be no temptation to tarry long there
With our ship bumper full we'll homeward repair.
This was re-published in 1914 in a bound edition of Greig's columns and I presume the text was available for every interested Folklorist among the manuscripts of the Greig-Duncan collection (which was published in its entirety only from 1981 to 2002). Greig collected this piece without any music, so it is not clear if it was a song or a poem. In fact it is a shortened version of a poem - not a song - written by the miller George Scroggie (according to some online sources he was from Fedderate, New Deer, Aberdeenshire) and published in 1857 in Aberdeen in his book The Peasant's Lyre, A Collection of Miscellaneous Poems:
|
Farewell to Tarwathie-- |
The birds here sing sweetly |
Now I don't want to discuss if A. L. Lloyd's informant in South Africa really existed, what exactly was Lloyd's input and who really combined the words and the melody to create the song as we know it today. The available information is a little too scarce. But by all accounts "Farewell To Tarwathie" never had any widespread popularity as a "Folk song", no matter how we define this term. It was passed on by all kinds of modern media: the book, where the original poem was published (even a rural poet like Mr. Scroggie preferred a book to oral transmission), a newspaper article by a noted Folklore collector as well as records and books by Folk Revivalists. It only started its existence as a so called "Folk song" in the Folk Revival era and I tend to believe that it was never a song before A. L. Lloyd put it together. But it seems to me that especially after Judy Collins recorded "Farewell To Tarwathie in 1970 for her LP Whales And Nightingales it was established as an "old Folk Song" and today there are at least 20 different recordings by younger artists available.
Credits & Notes:
- I owe most of the info used here to the discussion of "Farewell To Tarwathie" on the Mudcat Discussion Board (esp. the information about the Greig-Duncan collection, the note in The Singing Island, the text of the original poem and the one collected by Greig as well as the discussion of A.L. Lloyd's editing skills; they only missed the fact that Greig had indeed published his text). Thanks a lot!
- The GIF image of the score is borrowed from The Digital Tradition Mirror
- The history of the tune is interesting too. For a discussion see the thread about "Green Bushes" at the Mudcat Discussion Board . But it should be noted that that song was also sung to a different melody (see the alternate melody at the Digital Tradition Mirror ).
- Thanks once more to three excellent and indispensable databases: The Traditional Ballad Index , The Folk Music Index To Recordings and The Roud Folksong Index
- Other sites discussing "Farewell To Tarwathie": Henry's Songbook , (Mostly) English Folk Music
- About Tarwathie: see this site :
"There are actually three farms near Strichen having the name Tarwathie (North Tarwathie, South Tarwathie, and West Tarwathie), and no one has yet discovered from which farm the man in the poem might have come. Seafaring was, however, a popular form of livelihood in that part of Scotland, most of the farms, including West Tarwathie, being rather small and unlikely to support growing families. The closest ports then supporting large fishing fleets were Fraserburgh to the north and Peterhead to the east [...] In 1851, just six years before George Scroggie published his little book of poetry, there were perhaps close to a dozen whalermen from Aberdeenshire, any one of whom might have been the person in "Farewell to Tarwathie," intending "To follow the whale." - I was not able to find any more information about George Scroggie and his book. But maybe he was the George Scroggie from Old Deer, Aberdeenshire mentioned on this genealogical site (no. 105) where the 1826 is given as the year of birth.
© Jürgen Kloss
lostchords@morerootsofbob.de
MoreRootsOfBob.com
13.02.2009