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The Cruel Mother

from Porter Songs by Rusts

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about

‘Child destruction’ was sadly a more common practice than we would like, and in the 17th Century it became registered as an offence separate from homicide. It was around this time that the song, The Cruel Mother started to appear in print. Peppered with folklore and ancient references, the song appears in many forms. Searching in the EFDSS Full English Online Archive will bring up 42 different references to it, many full versions with different lyrics and tunes. The common theme is always the same: a young woman becomes pregnant out of wedlock, and chooses to dispose of the child, who then comes back to haunt her (it was believed that if someone dies before being baptised, rather than going to heaven, they return to haunt us).
It has been common practice to adapt and alter ballads to suit the context of the singer (or broadside ballad peddler), so I have chosen to make this a ‘Shepherd Wheel Version’. In most versions of the song, the mother kills the child with a pocket knife, while in this case I have reinterpreted it as a drowning, matching the circumstances of the newspaper story. Rather than being set in the ‘Greenwood Sidey’, it has become the green ‘Porter Valley’. Her father is no longer a ‘farmer’, now a ‘cutler’, who can be found not in a ‘hall’, but now a ‘hull’ (the local term for grinding trough).

It’s a genuine attempt to tell the story I found here, by adapting a version of an ancient song with universal themes, to a very local tale.

lyrics

There was a lady lived by the Porter
(All alone and a lonely)
A cutler’s son he courted her
(Down in the green Porter Valley)
He courted her for seven long years.
At last she proved in child with him.

She pitched her back against a tree.
And there she found great misery.

She pitched her back against a thorn.
And there she had her baby born.


She took her scarf from around her neck.
She bound her baby’s hands and legs.

Bound in paper, a brick and her daughter.
Bound for an end in Shepherd’s pond.

She watched her sink into the dark.
And as she sunk, it broke her heart.


As she was going to her father’s hull.
She saw three babes a playing at ball.

One dressed in silk, the other in satin, the other stark naked as ever was born.

Oh dear baby if you were mine,
I’d dress you in silk and satins so fine.

Oh dear mother I once was thine,
You never did dress me course or fine.
The cold dark pond it was my bed.
The darkest silt my coverlet.

credits

from Porter Songs, released June 21, 2015
From the Traditional song 'The Cruel Mother' adapted, arranged, performed and recorded by Scott Russell

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about

Rusts Sheffield, UK

Rusts is a Sheffield-based musical entity, creating homespun homages to people, places and the past.

A new album of songs by 19th Century Sheffield optician Edward Darbyshire will be released and toured in Spring 2018.

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