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Her Servant Man
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Her Servant Man
The Cruel Father / Her Servant Man / The Iron Door
[
Roud 539
; Master title: The Cruel Father
; Laws M15
; G/D 5:1003
; Henry H668
; Ballad Index LM15
; VWML LEB/2/34/1
, LEB/2/33
; Bodleian
Roud 539
; Wiltshire
499
; Mudcat 35651
, 148331
; trad.]
Lucy E. Broadwood: English Traditional Songs and Carols Roy Palmer: Folk Songs collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams Steve Roud, Julia Bishop: The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs Ken Stubbs: The Life of a Man
Peter Bellamy sang Her Servant Man accompanying himself on concertina at the Cockermouth Folk Club in January 1991. The concert was published on his cassette Songs an' Rummy Conjurin' Tricks. According to the cassette's liner notes, the song was “collected by Bob Copper from Mrs Gladys Swann of Hampshire.”
The 1977 Topic LP Songs and Southern Breezes: Country Singers from Hampshire and Sussex contains songs originally recorded for the BBC by Bob Copper between September 1954 and November 1957. Amongst them is Gladys Stone singing Her Servant Man. I presume that this is the version Peter Bellamy referred to and that he misspelled the singer's last name. This track was also included in 2012 on the Topic ballad anthology Good People, Take Warning (The Voice of the People Volume 23).
Emily Sparks sang The Iron Door in Rattlesden in 1958/59. This recording was included in 1993 on the Veteran anthology of traditional music making from Mid-Suffolk, Many a Good Horseman. John Howson commented in the liner notes:
This ballad was published by a remarkable number of 19th century broadside printers including Such, Disley, Fortey, Paul, Birt, Taylor and Catnach in London, Willey in Cheltenham, Dalton in York, Walker in Durham, Stewart in Carlisle and Fordyce and Ross in Newcastle, usually under the name The Cruel Father and Affectionate Lovers. Other titles, which are more descriptive of the storyline, include Since Love Can Enter an Iron Door, The Daughter in the Dungeon, and Mary and her Servant Man. It was collected from many southern English singers, yet rarely further north apart from a couple of versions collected in Scotland and several in Ireland. It was also widespread in North America particularly in Nova Scotia. In East Anglia the only sightings come in the Ralph Vaughan Williams manuscripts where the song was noted down in 1905 from Charles Potiphar at Ingrave, Essex and from John Chesson, in King's Lynn, Norfolk.
Nancy Kerr and Fay Hield learned The Servant Man from the Lucy Broadwood collection and her book English Traditional Songs and Carols (London: Boosey & Co, 1908, p. 38: The Young Servant Man, or, The Two Affectionate Lovers), and recorded it in 2013, with a tune written by Nancy, for the The Full English CD.
Martin Carthy sang Her Servant Man in 2014 on his and Eliza Carthy's duo album, The Moral of the Elephant. He commented in their album's sleeve notes:
Her Servant Man is from a recording very kindly sent to me by Vic Gammon of a woman called Mrs Stone, and I've enjoyed singing it even more than he insisted that I would. It's not that common a song, originally published as Daughter in the Dungeon, and its shifts in timing are lovely to sing.
Lyrics
Peter Bellamy sings Her Servant Man | The Full English sing The Servant Man |
---|---|
It's of a damsel both fair and handsome, |
It's of a damsel both fair and handsome, |
As Mary Ann and her love were walking |
As these two lovers were fondly talking |
His dungeon it was of bricks and mortar | |
Young Edwin he found her habitation, |
Young Edwin found her habitation, |
But when he found his daughter vanished, |
When her father found that she was vanished |
But when he saw him so tender-hearted |
When her father found him so tender-hearted |