[1982:] In the middle ages one of the few
entertainments available was to listen to ballads
sung by minstrels. [...] The servants would creep
in to the back of the hall and on to the
balconies to listen to the stories. Some would
learn them, or at least parts of them; and so, in
time, ballads became an entertainment for the
poor as well as the rich. [...] Poor people did
not necessarily want to hear about the derring-do
of noble knights and their ladies, so many
ballads gradually lost their upper-class cast of
characters, while still retaining the original
story lines.
[...] One such family is derived from a ballad
called Hynd Horn, which began life as a story
told in the medieval court. Hynd Horn variants
appear in folksong collections under such titles
as The broken token, A fair maid walking in her
garden, The faithful sailor, The dark-eyed sailor
and Claudy Banks, among many others. Although all
these versions vary to some extent in words and
details, all have the same basic Hynd Horn plot.
[...] (Readers of H. G. Wells's 'Kipps' will
recognise this as the source of the incident
early in the novel when Kipps and his childhood
sweetheart Ann split a sixpence between them, and
the fact that Wells could use this device in 1905
perhaps shows what a powerful hold the 'broken
token' image has on the popular imagination.
[...] What makes the history of Hynd Horn unusual
is that not only the story line but some of the
details have been preserved intact. In 1898 Mrs
Kate Lee was noting down songs at Rottingdean in
East Sussex, and among the pieces she collected
was one called Claudy Banks. The heroes of this
song were called Betsy and Johnny. A few years
later, at a Somerset cottage, the collector Cecil
Sharp took down a song which he called The banks
of Claudy from a Mrs Slade. In 1906 another
collector, George Gardiner, listened to a Mr
George Blake from Southampton singing a song that
he called The broken token. The names kept
changing: Betsy became Betty, Johnny became
William, the Betty became Nancy. But the story
remained the same, and so did individual lines of
the texts. It is remarkable that [these] and a
host of other singers from whom Hynd Horn
variants were collected round about the same time
were singing something that could be traced
directly back to the middle ages. How could it
happen? Part, at least, of the answer lies in the
story of the broadsides.
[...] some printers may have wanted to introduce
a few embellishments of their own, or to change a
few names and details so that their broadside was
recognisably theirs. That was how Johnny became
William, and Betty became Nancy. In some versions
of Hynd Horn the faithful girl finds on the
seashore not her long-lost lover but his body,
and in searching for means of identification
comes across the broken token.
[The printer James Catnach's] version, published
in the 1830s as Phoebe and her dark-eyed sailor
(yet another change of name for the girl) is said
by A. L. Lloyd to be the source of all the
variants collected around 1900. However, this
seems unlikely, and unfair to the resourcefulness
of Victorian broadside entrepreneurs. Although,
through all its variations, the Hynd Horn story
remains recognisable, there have clearly been
other hands at work, and these were probably
pirate printers working by candlelight in
Bristol, Nottingham and elsewhere. The Hynd Horn
story was what would today be called a
'standard'. (Pollard, Folksong 4f)
[...] the honour of noting the first folksong on
behalf of the Folk Song Society went to Mrs Kate
Lee who noted down Claudy Banks from the singing
of the Copper family. (Pollard, Folksong 20)
[2003:] This song has been widely collected in the British Isles and in North America, but only a few times in Australia. Kate Burke & Ruth Hazleton learnt their version from a recording of Simon McDonald of Creswick. Creswick is a smallish town not far north of Ballarat, which was the great centre of the early goldrushes. Creswick itself was for a time an important goldmining town. Many recordings of Simmy McDonald's songs and fiddle tunes were made over a number of visits by a team from the now-defunct Folklore Society of Victoria. McDonald's account of his family history was somewhat confused, but it appears that a Scottish sailor named McDonld married a Belfast girl named Gannon, and that the married couple migrated to Victoria before the goldrushes began, accompanied by the wife's parents. Both sides of the family, incidentally, were Catholic. Simon McDonald spent all his life as an unmarried, itinerant bush worker. Most of the songs from the British Isles in his repertory seem to have been handed down from his Belfast great-grandfather, and a few from his Belfast great-grandmother. Oddly enough, many of them seem fairly certainly of English rather than Irish origin. All the original recordings of McDonald are now held by the National Library of Australia. The scholar Hugh Anderson recorded many interviews with McDonald, dealing with his life, his songs and the poems which he wrote himself. From these interviews Anderson produced a book on McDonald's life and times, called 'Time Out Of Mind'. (Notes 'Song Links - The Australian Songs')
Susannes
Folksong-Notizen English Notes 
