Virginny

[ Roud 1488 ; Ballad Index FaE012 ; trad.]

Martin Carthy recorded Virginny for his 1976 album Crown of Horn and sang it live at the Folkfestival '76 Dranouter. He commented in his album's sleeve notes:

Charles Gamblin, a helper of the folksong collector George Gardiner, obtained Virginny from a Mrs Goodyear just outside Basingstoke. Mr Gamblin was considered unreliable as a notator of tunes by some who felt it necessary to double-check his finds, but this one seems to be all right. The song dates from before the American War of Independence when the British Establishment used Virginia and the Carolinas as a dumping ground for their social effluent. Victims served out their sentences in slavery, and, at the end, if they survived, often stayed to work the land for their own benefit. Many subsequently became extremely wealthy. The song seems only to have been collected twice—the other time from the East Anglian singer Bob Hart, in whose mouth the location is Australia.

Bob Hart's Australia mentioned in the previous quote can be found on his 1973 LP Songs from Suffolk and on the Topic anthology Hidden English: A Celebration of English Traditional Music. A.L. Lloyd commented in the sleeve notes of Bob Hart's LP:

Transportation to Australia was a popular theme for sentimental balladry throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Like most of the convicts, most of the songs came rather from the towns than the countryside. So with this one, by the sound of it. Though probably widely sung in the past, the song has dwindled almost out of sight and earshot now, and as far as I know, Bob's is the unique version, unreported elsewhere. It has aquired a verse from Van Diemen's Land (The farmers they stand with their whips in their hand / They yoke us like horses to plough up their land.)

Lyrics

Now come all you young fellers where'er you may be
Come listen a while and I'll tell you
It's many's the young man myself I have seen
More fitting to serve than to die on a string
But how odd were the judges, how cruel they have been
For to send us poor lads to Virginny

Now when we come to Virginny, that cold shameful place,
Which now I recall in my story
Our captain did stand with his whip and his cane
To bargain for us poor souls out of hand
Like horses they yoked us that had ploughed the salt main
How hard was my fate in Virginny

O England, sweet England, I fear I'll never see you more
And if I do, it's ten thousand to twenty
For me fingers they are rotting and me bones they are sore
I wonder about I'm right down to death's door
But if I can just live to see seven years' more
I will soon bid farewell to Virginny

Acknowledgements

Transcribed by Garry Gillard.