Instead there was a rather strange line: "Was e'er I taught so poor a wit". 1839, available at, "Down In Yon Meadows", tune and text from Thomas Hepple Manuscript, ca. The line "the water is wide" as used since Sharp definitely derives from Mrs. Mogg, it was her own variation of "the sea is wide" from the second edition of "I'm Often Drunk". Mostly it's his love and support of his students which shine the brightest. But the phrase "act such a childish part" seems to have been introduced by the "Unfortunate Swain". Nor do we know if and how much Ramsay and Thomson have edited their texts. She also performed "The Water Is Wide" in her concerts although to my knowledge she didn't record the song for any of her early LPs. The verse with the "cockle shells" is missing. This was in fact an abbreviated version of the old "Peggy Gordon" with some minor changes but the three verses can also be traced back to the first edition of the British broadside. Joseph Phair (Madden Ballads 7-4995) was busy in London between 1827 and 1853 (see, A second version of "I'm Often Drunk" is little bit shorter. Pat Conroy, an ambitious, slightly rebellious, idealistic teacher, accepts Bennington county SC's school board superintendent's offer to teach the all-black kids of the pauper fishery community on Yamacraw Island. By all accounts "The Unfortunate Swain" remained popular for considerable time. This is the first book I have read by Conroy. It is an engaging, if self-centered tale, written in the immediate wake of Conroy’s termination after a year and a month or so on the job, where he stirs things up by trying to broaden the horizons of his 18 students. The melody of Bob Dylan's "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" sounds as if it is closely related to the one used for "The Water Is Wide". A story of being apart. This would be the most logical explanation for the dissemination of this verses and phrases. The true story behind the Open Water movie, however, is much scarier simply because no one knows what really happened to Tom and Eileen Lonergan. Other editions of this version help to narrow the date. Ramsay's text was for example included on these two Long song sheets printed some time between 1813 and 1838: A quick search at Copac shows that it was also regularly published in new professional musical arrangements, for example in: And of course it found a place in scholarly publications like The Garland of Scotia. We again can find the song in different surroundings. Photo: A Dive Slate With A Distress Message Was Discovered Six Months After Their Disappearance. After you have tasted this river water in the novel, you will thirst for more. "Melody in Common Time", words: "The Happy Land" by Isaac Watts, from Joshua Leavitt, The Christian Lyre, Third Edition, Revised, New York 1831. 18 H, p. 110): Allen (p. 164) also claims that the tune of a variant called "Deep In Love" - collected by H. E. D. Hammond in Dorset in 1905 (see Broadwood et al. Already in 1954 J. W. Allen - in a seminal article in the, But at first it is necessary to go back to 1720s and have a look at this old Scottish ballad "Oh Waly, Waly, Gin Love Be Bonny". Maybe this line was the starting-point for the development of the key verses  of "Little Sparrow". He is a gadfly, afflicting the comfortable. These notes are somewhat misleading. Published in the early 70’s, this is the phenomenal memoir of Pat Conroy as a teacher in 1969, on Defuskie Island, SC. According to most experts "Oh Waly, Waly" apparently predates "Jamie Douglas" (see Bronson III, p.258; Friedman 1956, p. 101, Allen 1954, p. 166). It was later also published in Everybody's Songster (1859, Roud ID S187124) and the Old Armchair Songster (1860, Roud ID S302091). The first few chapters deal with his teaching the children, which I found interesting, but just as I was beginning to lose a little interest he changed and began talking about the people he met on the island--good character studies. It was published regularly – though sometimes with different titles - for at least 70 years. 35 B, p. 172, "Waly, Waly (The Water Is Wide)", sung by Mrs. Elizabeth Mogg, Somerset, 1904, collected by Cecil Sharp, from Karpeles, Sharp Collection, No. Third Series, 1906, p. 32/33, Title page, Cecil Sharp & Charles R. Marson, Folk Songs From Somerset. In My Losing Season the way he describes a basketball game is pure poetry. Unfortunately we don't know anything else about this song. 11, 1867 (available at, Bruce Olson, An Incomplete Index Of Scottish Popular Song And Dance Tunes Printed In The 18th Century, 1998 (available on the late Bruce Olson's, Roy Palmer, Birmingham Ballad Printers, Part Four: V - W (mustrad article, Louise Pound,  American Ballads And Songs, New York 1922 (available at, Frank Purslow, Marrow Bones. You false-hearted young men you know you have deceived me, Oh, love is a teasin' and love is pleasin', She regarded this song as an "enchanting version of 'Waly, Waly'" but in fact it looks more like a fragment of "Love It Is Easin'/Pleasin'/Teasin'" as collected in Britain by Williams, Hammond and Gardiner. What about the tune used by Mrs. Cox? In the, Another edition was brought out by William Wright from Birmingham (Madden Ballads 11-7422). Remember Erin Brockovich ? It was a year that changed his life, and one that introduced a group of poor black children to a … Graham noted that the "air is beautiful and pathetic" but complained about the quality of earlier arrangements: The song was also well known in North America. ― Pat Conroy, The Water is Wide “No story is a straight line. But just like John Gay they both didn't use the version from Thomson's Orpheus Caledonius but instead one that suited Ramsay's 8-line double-stanzas: Allan Ramsay's text remained available throughout the 18th century, not only because the Tea-table Miscellany were reprinted regularly: 1793 saw the 18th edition. The Wave The True Story Behind 'The Wave' Buy Study Guide. 34, available at the Internet Archive): Ramsay has marked "Oh, Waly, Waly" with a "Z" as an "old song", but we don't know how old it was when he published it. It was in effect a new song constructed from relics of two popular songs. Credit is due to Conroy for covering his own history of racial stereotyping and admitting that his own ego contributed to his being fired for bucking the system too much. I heard it first from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez who sang it as a duet in 1975. A. Fuller Maitland's. It remained in print during the next century and was still regularly performed and published. The song was reissued two years later by another publisher, Novello & Co. , as sheet music in the series "School Songs". This song was first printed in 1725/6 in two groundbreaking publications. For example it  became a refrain in a "simple ditty with a pleasant air" called "Love It Is Easing" that was noted by British collector Alfred Williams  in Wiltshire County (MS collection No Wt 496, undated, before 1914; also available at the Full English Digital Archive: AW/4/193): In Scotland Greig and Duncan have noted a fragment with only one verse that could be a relic of this song (Greig-Duncan VI, No.1166, p. 252): Other more complete versions were collected by H. E. D. Hammond in Somerset in 1905 ("Love It Is Pleasing", HAM/2/1/23) and by Charles Gardiner in Hampshire in 1907 ("Love Is Teasing", GG/1/16/1002, both at the Full English). His 12-string guitar was always tuned down so that the bass notes were big and round, filling the hall as would a string quartet. He refers to his One Hundred Folk Songs and in fact he uses six of the eight verses of the version published in that book, although most of them in a slightly edited form. I realize this book has an underlying focus on racism in the South in the late '60s, but the other plot line I what resonated with me-a gifted teacher unfairly losing his job. ), The Scots Musical Museum, Vol. Tune and words collected by C. J. The work is autobiographical, and the story is related through the eyes of the author, Pat Conroy, himself. His Orpheus Caledonius - the very first collection of Scottish songs - was dedicated to the Princess of Wales. It remained in print during the next century and was still regularly performed and published. A new love song. The melody was used for example for teaching the violin (Howe's New Violin Without A Master, 1847, p. 111). Variants of the second verse - "Come all ye fair maids, now take a warnin [...]'" - are of course also known from the American song "Fair And Tender Ladies". As already noted he forgot to give credit to Sharp and his informants in the liner notes to his record but had to acknowledge the original copyright by Novello & Co. when the piece was published by Oak Publications in 1960 in the songbook American Favorite Ballads. Instead for some reason it is claimed that this "famous old song […] is widely known and sung throughout all English-speaking countries". Please help to make … The original version of "The Water is Wide" can be found in Folk Songs From Somerset. This one is also listed in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC T197384) with "1790?" For reasons unknown to me the "false lover" in the stanza starting with "I wish I was in Dublin city" was replaced by "lawyers". It seems this song was very popular. There he obviously had great success and was "favoured at court on account of his Scots songs" (Farmer 1962, p. I). J. W. Allen (p. 163 & 171) notes that "a similar tune to this occurs in a version of 'Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor" and again in a version of [...] 'Young Hunting', from the Appalachians", all collected by Cecil Sharp in 1916. 290-293, version A & C). Inside you'll find 30 Daily Lessons, 20 Fun Activities, 180 Multiple Choice Questions, 60 Short Essay Questions, 20 Essay Questions, … Variants of the second verse - "Come all ye fair maids, now take a warnin [...]'" - are of course also known from the American song "Fair And Tender Ladies". The two main environmental news stories of the past year or so have been the twin impending disasters of global warming and water shortages. Based on a true story, The Water is Wide is a wonderfully written story of Pat Conroy's fight to educate the impoverished children on an isolated island. The oldest has been in use for nearly 400 years  and even the youngest is known for nearly two centuries. A. Fuller Maitland, English County Songs, London [1893], Lucy E. Broadwood et al.,  1923, Songs of Unhappy Love, in: Journal of the Folk-Song Society, Vol. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. He wrote this book before he decided to tell the world about his family. In fact three of them are variants of verses 5, 6 and 7 from the broadside text while the fourth is partly related to another verse from "Waly, Waly". Conroy spent a year teaching at an all-black school on an island off South Carolina. This ballad was first printed in a fragmentary version in in 1776 in the second edition of David Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (Vol. A second version of "I'm Often Drunk" is little bit shorter. Such a beautiful writer that draws you in more and more and leaves you wanting more. This is an inspiring, uplifting book and I am a better perso. Another offspring of "I'm Often Drunk" was published in 1900 in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society. Then last year someone at work gave me this book as a gift, and I have finally read i. Here’s an author I had overlooked, regrettably, as my prejudice had relegated him to a grade B author – too popular to really be any good (or so I thought). But I assume that he simply wanted to obscure the fact that he had learned it from a book. Lomax' "Love Is Pleasin'" is not so much a "Folk"-version of "Waly, Waly" but a fragment of the broadside song "The Wheel Of Fortune". He then compiled his own new "old" song from those fragments and published it as, Waly, waly. ), Cecil Sharp's Collection Of English Folk Songs, Vol. Being the second part of The Beggar's opera, 1729, Act 1, Air VII, here p. 19 from an edition published London 1922, source: "Waly,Waly", from William McGibbon, A Collection of Scots Tunes [...] With some Additions by Robert Bremner, London [1768], Book III, p.87, source of image: pdf-file downloaded from IMSLP. Conroy obviously cares deeply for these children and is proud of his efforts, so this is an upbeat, funny and heart-warming book despite the frustrations of battling a discriminatory system. In his memoir, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, Bilott says that after an MRI (which is shown in the movie), doctors could only really diagnose the issue as "unusual brain activity." Parts of the book are absolutely hilarious! Sharp also remarked that he had "noted this song in Somerset five times - tunes and words varying considerably" but that "our Somerset words have so much affinity with the well-known Scottish ballad 'Waly, Waly' that we are publishing them under the same title". Their song included variants of two verses known from the old Scottish ballad but otherwise the rest of the text and the tune were completely different. (I do. While I was hanging about the local bookseller (as opposed to a book store) waiting for Conroy to write another book, I realized I had never read The Water is Wide. 99, p. 205) have published a version in their collections as have for example also Cecil Sharp (No. In fact it was mostly a compilation of verses from earlier broadsides: at least five of the nine were borrowed from other songs. I really wonder where he got that information. I, Edinburgh 1876 & Vol. Campbell & Sharp 1917, No. One version (text A) was sent to him by Miss Octavia L. Hoare, a correspondent from Cornwall. Another edition was brought out by William Wright from Birmingham (Madden Ballads 11-7422). Dylan later reported that he had "heard a Scottish ballad on an old 78 record that I was trying to really capture the feeling of, that was haunting me [...] It was just a melody (, Sam Hinton's version on "The Wandering Folk Song" (1966, Folkways. Newcastle Ale (, It was somehow courageous to publish this piece as a "new song". One  ("I set my foot against an oak...") was cribbed from "Oh Waly, Waly". Pat Conroy is a wizard with words. In fact every new edit makes this line look older and more like the one in "Waly, Waly": "grows older" in the texts from the broadside and from Mrs. Mogg was first  changed by Sharp to "groweth cold" and then in this variant to "waxes cold" which is just like the original: But in most of the versions used today the "morning" has returned and these days the second half of this verse looks surprisingly similar to the corresponding lines in "Oh Waly, Waly": every editor since Sharp has added one more element of the original text. To see what your friends thought of this book, I spent 2 years teaching at a high school on a sea island in South Carolina. But at first it is necessary to go back to 1720s and have a look at this old Scottish ballad "Oh Waly, Waly, Gin Love Be Bonny". Sam Hinton's version on "The Wandering Folk Song" (1966, Folkways FW 02401, see the liner notes, p. 2) is one of the few that was taken directly from Cecil Sharp. He is shocked by the impact of the historical m. Conroy, a successful novelist, spent a year teaching on an isolated island off the coast of South Carolina. Here he described "The Water Is Wide" as "another song from England, collected by Cecil Sharp many years ago and titled by him 'Waillie, Waillie'" (p. 77). Didn't they make a movie about it too? In this case he would have marked "Oh Waly,Waly" not with a "Z" as an old song but with a "Q, old songs with additions". A new Song, [London?, s.n., 1780?] by H. M. Belden & A. P. Hudson, Durham 1952 (available at, The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, Volume 3: Folk Songs From North Carolina, ed. Picking lillies, 3. In fact both were only half right. In another song from West Virginia called "Youth And Folly" we find variant forms of three verses known from "Peggy Gordon". On his LP "The Wandering Folk Song" (1966, Folkways, On this LP Hinton also sings an "anti-liquor song"  called "Intemperance" - found in ", The two fragments Sharp secured from Elizabeth Mogg are relics of another broadside ballad called "I'm Often Drunk And Seldom Sober". B. Cramer & Co, 1931 (see, Like Morning Dew. They indicate that the most common ways of cleaning water were by boiling it over a fire, heating it in the sun, or by dipping a heated piece of iron into it. 1, here pp. 165, p. 428) and a piece called "Spanish Lady" from West Virginia (Cox, No.158, p. 466). 1650, ESTC R227870, available at EEBO; see also Pepys 4.158, 1681-84, at EBBA): But "Oh Waly, Waly" also shares four verses with "Arthur's Seat Shall Be My Bed, or: Love in Despair". 3, p. 298). 1 (1876, p. 226) includes a song called "The Prickly Rose" that he had collated from two Scottish variants of "The Unfortunate Swain". My first teaching job plunked me down in a non-air-conditioned overcrowded school in Little Havana (in the heart of the city of Miami, FL for you non-natives) with 100% of my students hailing from Cuba, South America, Puerto Rico, etc. My first teaching job plunked me down in a non-air-conditioned overcrowded school in Little Havana (in the heart of the city of Miami, FL for you non-natives) with 100% of m. This is probably more of a reflection than a"review" I read this book when I first started teaching, and my naive and much younger self wanted to be exactly the kind of teacher Pat Conroy had wanted to be-one who worked with children who needed me and whose lives I could touch in some way-only I would do it better of course! Conroy's idealism and belief that right and wrong are the only thing that matters leads to him becoming a passionate advocate of the island children, and earns him the enmity of people who just want to c. I knew that this was a memoir but I didn't realize it was a memoir about one specific year in the author's life; 1969. It seems that the original "Oh Waly, Waly" was literally broken into pieces by the writers of all those broadsides. It was published on a broadside where it was only called  "A New Love Song". No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the sacred auspices of all school boards in the world.”, Did you have trouble with the inherent racism of the time while reading it? Conroy, in his young twenties, a relatively recent graduate from The Citadel, had taught high school on the mainland for a couple of years. 204, p. 93): This particular lines were also used as the fourth verse in a Cantus for three voices that was published in Aberdeen in 1666 in the second edition of Thomas Davidson's Cantus, songs and fancies, to three, four, or five parts (ESTC R213597, available  at EEBO, image 48): Of course this doesn't mean that "Oh Waly, Waly" already existed at that time. Here it was replaced with another line of somehow dubious quality. The earliest version of the last verse of looks a little bit different from the one used for "The Water Is Wide": According to Robert Chambers (1829, p. 134) "troly, loly" was common as a "burden [...] of songs [...] during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries". After having read all his other books and knowing his family history, it was an interesting read. All the collected texts are very close to the commercially published versions. A teacher recounts a year on Yamacraw Island, off the South Carolina coast, when he helped black children gain an awareness of themselves as well as the world around them. 100-1) and Edward F. Rimbault's  Musical Illustrations of Bishop Percy's Reliques (1850, pp.102 & 35-6). A TRUE STORY as it happened. The new queen had been separated from her husband for a long time but she was still very popular in England and was  received with great entusiasm. He noted that it was "a fragment of a song frequently sung by the Newcastle pitmen". 11, p. 441). And neither have I wings to fly. Third Series (No. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published It consists of the same four verses as the version from Newcastle published in Notes And Queries in 1867, that means including the additional one starting with "I wish, I wish in vain [...]". Unfortunately, the problems he describes in the school on an island in South Carolina where he taught for a year, occur in far too many schools. Third Series, London 1906 (available as a pdf-file at, Cecil Sharp, One Hundred English Folk Songs For Medium Voice, Boston & New York 1916 (available at, Betty N. Smith, Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers, Lexington 1998, Harold W. Thompson, Body, Boots, & Britches: Folktales, Ballads, and Speech from Country New York, Syracuse 1979 (first published 1939; partly available at, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/sm1880.01560, Copac National, Academic, and Specialist Library Catalogue, Glasgow Broadsides Ballads - The Murray Collection, John Jacob Niles - Dean of American Balladeers, Jane Keefer, Folk Music - An Index To Recorded Sources, The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Music For The Nation: American Sheet Music, A Traditional Music Library of folk music, tune-books, songbooks and sheet music. That's a nice alliteration and it sounds much better than the original lines. Tennant suspected that the water supply poisoned by the nearby DuPont plant was responsible. Most of all, he was in my favorite local bookstore 5 years ago, Left Bank books in Saint Louis, and I did not show. Both are derived from "The Unfortunate Swain" and both share one verse of the original broadside text as Seeger's edited version of Sharp's "Waly, Waly" still  includes these lines: "Must I Go Bound" is in fact "The Water Is Wide" with a different melody and a different lead verse: the one starting with "Must I go bound [...]". But nowadays usually only four verses are sung: one ("I put my hand into some soft bush […]") got lost sometime during the '60s. Many thanks  to Stewart Grant who has written about “The Water Is Wide” for my former website and  who encouraged me find out a little more about this song! The text remained more or less stable, there were only minor changes as well as occasional attempts at repairing some of its flaws (see the pdf-file with all available printed variants). It takes place in the 1960s on a Gullah Island off South Carolina and is actually an autobiography of Conroy's year plus on the island teaching black kids. 1857 online available at, "The Prickly Rose", from William Christie , Traditional Ballad Airs, Vol. William Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs, Vol. And now we have arrived again at the text I have quoted in the very first chapter: This reduced version looks in fact very close to the original "Oh Waly, Waly": variant forms of two of these four verses – the third and the fourth - had already been part of that old Scottish ballad when it was first published by Thomson and Ramsay in 1726. SBS introduces Deep Water: The Real Story - part of a network event that unearths a gripping true crime story and a buried chapter of Australia’s recent history. I LOVE Pat Conroy's writing! It was quite difficult for me to read how inspired Conroy was in the classroom, how much he cared about his students and their minds and futures only to be told he's insubordinate and no longer wanted. To which are added, Tippet is the dandy---o. Robertson (18?? The Water Is Wide Ariel Li. 487-8, in the edition published in 1839): Another version of this song can be found in the Thomas Hepple Manuscript. He is appalled at the poor level of education and limited aspirations of his students due to the isolation of the fishing community and cycle of poverty. He encounters children who are savvy but unschooled for all the time they have spent in the classroom. I haven't been able to check these publications and can't say if it's exactly the same text.