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Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary?

[ Roud V16277 ; Ballad Index Grg076b ; Robert Burns]

Gavin Greig: Folk-Song in Buchan and Folk-Song of the North-East

Jean Redpath sang Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary? in 1981 on her Philo album The Songs of Robert Burns Volume 3. Esther Hovey noted:

Burns’s own words best explain the origin of and his feelings about this song. In the Interleaved Museum, he commented:

I am not sure if this old and charming air be of the South, as is commonly said, or of the North of Scotland. There is a song apparently as ancient as Ewe-bughts Marion, which sings to the same tune, and is evidently of the North. It begins thus:

The Lord o’ Gordon had three dochters,
Mary, Marget, and Jean,
They wad na stay at bonie Castle-Gordon
But awa to Aberdeen.

To his editor, Thomson, he wrote (27 October 1792):

Ewe bughts Marion has obtained a place among our more classical Scots songs; & what with many beauties in its composition, & more prejudices in its favour, you will not find it easy to supplant it.—In my very early years, when I was thinking of going to the West Indies, I took the following farewell of a dear girl.—It is quite trifling, & has nothing of the merits of ‘Ewebughts’; but it will fill up this page.—You must know, that all my earlier love-songs were the breathings of ardent Passion; & tho’ it might have been easy in aftertimes to have given them a polish, yet that polish, to me, whose they were, & who perhaps alone cared for them, would have defaced the leg end of my heart, which was so faithfully inscribed on them.—Their uncouth simplicity was, as they say of wines, their RACE.

Jim Reid sang Will Ye Go to the Indies? in 2001 on the Linn anthology The Complete Songs of Robert Burns Volume 5.

Éilís Kennedy sang Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary? on her 2017 album Westward. She noted:

As we sat in her sunny, instrument-filled living room, Shelley Phillips played this on the harp and I fell in love with the melody and the idea of Burns heading off from his native Scotland to the warm and exotic shores of the West Indies. Mary Campbell (Highland Mary) and Burns hoped to make a life in the West Indies but fate,and her untimely death, intervened.

Lyrics

Jean Redpath sings Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary?

Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,
And leave auld Scotia’s shore?
Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,
Across the Atlantic roar?

O sweet grows the lime and the orange,
And the apple on the pine;
But all the charms o’ the Indies
Can never equal thine.

I have sworn by the Heavens to my Mary,
I have sworn by the Heavens to be true;
And may the Heavens forget me,
When I forget my vow!

O plight me your faith, my Mary,
And plight me your lily-white hand;
O plight me your faith, my Mary,
Before I leave Scotia’s strand.

We have plighted our truth, my Mary,
In mutual affection to join;
And cursed be the cause that would part us!
The hour and the moment of time!