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The Queen of May

[ Roud 594 ; Ballad Index SWMS190 / ShH53 ; trad.]

Shirley Collins recorded The Queen of May in 1958 for her second album, False True Lovers. Alan Lomax commented in the album's notes:

[This song,] from Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs, tells the second part of the story introduced by My Bonny Cuckoo. When the cry of the cuckoo echoed through the meadows on the eve of the first of May, the young men and women went out together to gather May blossoms and to make love among the springtime blossoms. So deep-rooted was this pagan fertility practice that Protestant ministers were still unsuccessfully trying to eradicate it late in the 19th century. The feeling still lingers in rural England, especially in the lyric songs. It was a misfortune that prudery was at its height. At the time Cecil Sharp was collecting and publishing, fifty years ago, in order to be able to introduce his folk-song finds into the school system, he was forced to bowderlerise the texts and transform many innocently erotic but extremely beautiful songs into the pallid, sentimental pieces which finally turned many Britons against folk music. This, I feel sure, is one of the songs Sharp had to censor. What really happened that May Day morning under the oak tree was probably not legalised in the original folk version that Sharp collected. Of course, it is not possible for an American to cast stones in regard to censorship, for today American school text book editors behave far more prudishly than did Sharp, and poor Baring-Gould in the worst years of the mauve decade.

Lyrics

As I was a-walking to take the fresh air,
The flowers all blooming and gay,
i heard a young damsel so sweetly a-singing,
Her cheeks like flowers in May.

I said, “Pretty maiden, may I go with you,
Through the flowers to gather some May?“
The maid she replied, “My path it is here,
I pray you pursue your own way.”

So she tripped along with her dear little feet,
But I followed, and soon I drew near,
I called her my pretty, my true love so sweet,
So she took me at last for her dear.

I took this fair maid by the lily-white hand,
On a green mossy bank we sat down;
I gave her a kiss on her sweet rosy lips,
A tree spread its branches around.

Now when we did rise from that sweet mossy grove,
In the meadows we wandered away;
And I sat my true love on a primrose bank,
And picked her a handful of May.

The very next morning I made her my bride,
Just after the breaking of day;
The bells they did ring, and the birds they did sing,
As I crowned her my Queen of sweet May.