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The North Country Maid

[ Roud 1367 ; Ballad Index LK43B ; trad.]

The Watersons sang The North Country Maid in 1966 on their second album, The Watersons. Like all but one tracks from this LP, it was re-released in 1994 on the CD Early Days. It was also reissued in 1997 on the 3CD compilation New Electric Muse II and in 2002 on the Topic 4CD sampler The Acoustic Folk Box

The Watersons also sang The North Country Maid in 1965 on their BBC TV documentary video Travelling for a Living; this can be found on YouTube now:

A.L. Lloyd commented in the original album's sleeve notes:

This familiar song can be found in a black-letter copy also in the Roxburgh collection. There, it's titled The Northern Lasse's Lamentation; or, the Unhappy Maid's Misfortune, and it's prefaced by a few melancholy lines:

Since she did from her friends depart
No earthly thing can cheer her heart,
But still she doth her case lament
Being always fill'd with discontent,
Resolving to do naught but mourn
Till to the North she doth return.

J. Collingwood Bruce and John Stokoe printed a set of the song in their Northumbrian Minstrelsey of 1882, noting how: “Sir Walter Scott, in his novel Rob Roy, makes the narrator of the tale (Francis Osbaldiston) in recounting recollections of his childhood, tell how his Northumbrian nurse (old Mabel) amused him by singing the ditties of her native countrie, and specially names O! the Oak and the Ash and the Bonny Ivy Tree as a Northumbrian ballad.”

The stately tune started life as a dance tune, found in many places and under many titles but especially in Sir James Hawkin's Transcripts of Music for the Virginals, and The Dancing Master, of 1650, under the title Goddesses.

The refrain in all its home-sick nostalgia may be encountered, oddly enough, in the robust and unbuttoned sailors' song, Home, Dearie Home, or Rosemary Lane.

The song's popularity has scarcely waned in the twentieth century; Marianne Faithfull recently recorded The North Country Maid and it might make the top twenty yet.

Lyrics:

The Watersons sing The North Country Maid

A North country maid up to London has strayed
Although with her nature it did not agree
And she's wept and she's sighed
And she's wrung her hands and cried
Oh I wish once again in the North I could be

Chorus (after each verse):

Where the oak and the ash
And the bonny ivy tree
All flourish and bloom
In my North country

How sadly I roam and lament my dear home
Where lads and lasses are making the hay
Where the bells they do ring
And the little birds they sing
And the maidens and meadows are pleasant and gay

No doubt if I please I could marry with ease
For where bonnie lasses are lovers will come
But the lad that I wed
Must be North country bred
And must carry me back to my North country home

Acknowledgements

Transcribed by Garry Gillard