What is that blood on thy shirtsleeve ?

Lyrics

1
“What is that blood on thy shirt sleeve,
My son, come tell it unto me.”
“’Tis the blood of my dear brother,
Who I killed under yonder tree,
Who I killed under yonder tree.”

2
“What did thou kill thy dear brother for,
My son, come tell it unto me.”
“Because he shot the three little pretty birds,
That flew from tree to tree,
That flew from tree to tree.”

3
“What will thou do when thy father comes home,
My son, come tell it unto me.”
“I’ll plant my foot on board a ship,
And sail across the sea,
And sail across the sea.”

4
“What will thou do with thy children three,
My son, come tell it unto me.”
“I will leave them in my good old father’s care,
To keep him company,
To keep him company.”

5
“What will thou do with thy dear wife,
My son, come tell it unto me.”
“She will plant her foot on board a ship,
And sail along with me,
And sail along with me.”

6
“When shall I see thy good old face again,
My son, come tell it unto me.”
“When the fish they fly and the seas run dry,
And that will never never be,
And that will never never be.”

Sung by Frank Hinchliffe on the LP In Sheffield Park, Traditional Songs from South Yorkshire. Child 13.

This is a traditional song

Provenance

English, Irish, Scottish and American versions of this famous ballad all have their own autonomy and within these countries versions are pretty consistent in their selection of the questions and answers from a common original. No single country’s variant can be definitely said to derive from  another’s solely based on the content. The earliest version available to us today has proved simply a distraction that has only contaminated other spurious versions. All of the genuine oral versions appear to have been unaffected by Thomas Percy’s literary concoction, except that occasionally they have been forced to use Percy’s ironic title Edward which occurs in no other version. Various scholars since Child’s time have argued in fine detail the reasons why Percy’s concoction could not be a ballad from oral tradition. (See B. H. Bronson, The Ballad as Song, University of California, 1969, Edward, Edward, A Scottish ballad, [1940]; and Archer Taylor, Edward and Sven i Rosengard, 1931)

Theories have been expressed which suggest that Scandinavian versions derive from a British original, but the reverse is much more likely. As with many other ballads in European countries that hold ballads in common, oral versions often ultimately derive from literary translations from another country’s stock of ballads. Another way in which they pass from one language to another is through the ballad circulating as a story and then being put into ballad form by a retained or itinerant  minstrel looking for fresh material. I know of no instance where a ballad has migrated across language barriers without literary assistance: With literary assistance examples are numerous.

The earliest English version, from Tarvin in Cheshire, comes from only fifty miles away from Crosspool on the western outskirts of Sheffield where Frank Hinchliffe spent his life. Its text was written down as part of a Cheshire Soul-caking play recovered from one of the actors in c1891. (See JEFDSS Vol III No. 3 [1938] p205)

The English version has only one textual aspect which is peculiar to it, and that is the excuse given by the murderer for murdering his brother. In Irish, Scottish and American versions, in answer to the mother’s ‘Why did you quarrel?’ he responds with ‘Because he cut down a sapling which might have become a tree’, whereas in the English version he responds with ‘Because he killed two/three pretty little birds that flew from tree to tree.’ Both of these responses are of course to emphasise the killer’s beating his brow and simply symbolic of saying their argument was over something extremely trivial.

Frank Hinchliffe’s version contains an element not found in any other version I have seen. In all English language versions where in the final stanza the mother asks when he will return, he replies with the commonplace ‘When the sun and the moon meet in the sky’ or some derivative/variant of this, but in Frank’s version this response has been replaced by the equally commonplace ‘When the fish they fly and the seas run dry’ found in such ballads as The Grey Cock, Roud 179. Both belong to a widely used stock of commonplaces known as ‘marvels’ or ‘impossibilities’ which date back to the pre-print era. (See for example, Roxburghe Ballads, Vol 1, P492, c1650, stanzas 21 and 27)

Frank’s cousins, George White and Grace Walton, both sang versions of the ballad and all three versions derive from the singing of their grandparents, Joshua D White (b1843) and Rose Hannah Marsden (b1848) via their respective parents. Frank’s son, Roger, and another relative, Ken Hinchliffe, continue the family repertoire to the present day. We are indebted to Dr. Ian Russell of the Elphinstone Institute, Aberdeen, for the above biographical information, and an excellent article Stablility and  Change in a Sheffield Singing Tradition by Ian appeared in Folk Music Journal Vol 5, No 3, 1987, pages 317-358, which gives a very comprehensive picture of the tradition west of Sheffield at that time.

We are grateful to the recordists for permission to reproduce this recording.