The Cruel Mother

"The Cruel Mother" (a.k.a. "The Greenwood Side") (Child 20, Roud 9) is a murder ballad.^[1]

Synopsis

A woman gives birth to one or two illegitimate children (usually sons) in the woods, kills them, and buries them. On her return trip home, she sees a child, or children, playing, and says that if they were hers, she would dress them in various fine garments and otherwise take care of them. The children tell her that when they were hers, she did not dress them so but murdered them. Frequently they say she will be damned for it.

Some variants open with the account that she has fallen in love with her father's clerk.

Variants

This ballad exists in a number of variants; one contains a number of verses that appear to stem from "The Maid and the Palmer".^[2] A closely related German ballad exists in many variants: a child comes to a woman's wedding to announce himself her child and that she had murdered three children, the woman says the Devil can carry her off if it is true, and the Devil appears to do so.^[3] Variants include "Carlisle Hall", "The Rose o Malinde", "Fine Flowers in the Valley", "The Minister's Daughter of New York", and "The Lady From Lee", among others. "Fine Flowers of the Valley" is a Scottish variant.

Ballad scholar Hyder Rollins listed a broadside print dated 1638, and a fairly complete version was published in London in broadside ballad format as "The Duke's Daughter's Cruelty: Or the Wonderful Apparition of two Infants whom she Murther'd and Buried in a Forrest, for to hide her Shame" sometime between 1684-1695.^[4]

This ballad was one of 25 traditional works included in Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912) and illustrated by Vernon Hill (sculptor).

Recordings

Album/Single	Performer	Year	Variant	Notes
The Judy Collins Concert	Judy Collins	1964	The Cruel Mother	.
The Long Harvest, Vol. 1	Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger	1967	see note	Album contains three versions of The Cruel Mother, one variant called "Down By the Greenwood Sidey-O", and another called "The Lady From Lee".
Joan	Joan Baez	1967	The Greenwood Side	.
A Beacon from Mars	Kaleidoscope	1968	The Greenwood Side	.
Landfall	Martin Carthy	1972	The Cruel Mother	.
Flesh and Blood	Maddy Prior	1997	The Cruel Mother	.
Live at Newport	Ian & Sylvia	1996	The Greenwood Side	Recorded live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963.
Songs Of Experience	Cindy Mangsen	1998	The Cruel Mother	.
No Earthly Man	Alasdair Roberts	2005	The Cruel Mother	.
Wolverley Summer of Love 2007	Stuart Estell	2007	The Cruel Mother	.
To The Ground	Kerfuffle	2006	Down By The Greenwood Side	.
In The Shadow of Mountians	Bella Hardy	2009	Cruel Mother	Miss Hardy omits 'The' from the title but it is nonetheless a variant of the folk song.
Lady Diamond	Bryony Griffith & Will Hampson	2011	The Lady of York	From the singing of Jim Eldon.

See also

References

1. ^ Francis James Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, "The Cruel Mother"
2. ^ Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v 1, p 218, Dover Publications, New York 1965
3. ^ Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v 1, p 219, Dover Publications, New York 1965
4. ^ Cazden, Norman, Herbert Haufrechtt, and Norman Studer. Folksongs of the Catskills. Albany: SUNY Press, 1982. 251-252. Print.

External links

• The Cruel Mother
• The Cruel Mother with historical commentary
• Fine Flowers in the Valley variant
• An MP3 recording of The Cruel Mother by Kentucky ballad singer Daniel Dutton