The other side of spunkies, kelpies, dead-lights and wraiths

I first heard an extract of this letter performed in the Edinburgh International Festival’s 2022 production Burn, a one-man show about Robert Burns starring Alan Cumming, where the quote about the ‘old Maid’, ‘remarkable for her ignorance’ was played for laughs.

I remember the sudden and acute feeling of anger that came over me in the theatre. At the time I was some way through writing the fourth or fifth draft of my novel, Murder Ballad, and had been immersed in Burns’ late 18th-century Edinburgh. I had been particularly drawn towards the interaction between traditional, folkloric culture and classical, literary and musical works.

The Enlightenment was a time when literate people (men mainly, but also educated women) took a great interest in folklore, traditional music and country ballads, either writing them down in collections, such as Bishop Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, or leaning upon their forms, like Wordsworth and Coleridge do in several poems within Lyrical Ballads, such as ‘The Female Vagrant’ or ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.

Robert Burns (Image: free)

Burns was not averse to cashing in on his ‘old Maid’s’ remarkable ignorance. ‘Tam O’Shanter’, his masterpiece, draws heavily on the ‘devils, ghosts…witches, warlocks’ and ‘apparitions’ she taught him, and when published in 1791 earned him both coin and literary immortality.

To hear this letter quoted on stage with all its casual derision (the anonymity of ‘old Maid’, ‘remarkable for her ignorance’), passed over without 21st century re-evaluation, met by nothing but a chuckle from an Edinburgh festival audience, felt like a slap through the centuries to the woman who had provided the building blocks for the poet’s most famous work. (She did have a name by the way, it was Betty Davidson).

Burns was far from alone in taking ideas from people who did not have the literacy or agency to be able to write their own music or stories. The 18th-century Edinburgh organist Stephen Clarke, a friend and correspondent of Burns, admitted to composing the tune to Burns’ poem ‘My Hoggie’, ‘from an old woman’s singing it while spinning outside her cottage in a hamlet of Liddesdale’.

He also sent up the music he appropriated, once setting his friend the task ‘by way of a joke’ to ‘keep to the black keys of the harpsichord, and preserve some kind of rhythm and he would infallibly compose a Scots air.’

Murder Ballad (Image: free)

In my Murder Ballad research I had been learning that folk singing – particularly urban street ballad singing – was a culture dominated by women. I had been excited to find one of the ways in which women, particularly women of lower social status, had shaped mainstream culture during the Enlightenment. (The handing down of folklore and songs from nurse to child was another.) And yet these cultural contributions had been invariably passed through the lens of literate artists.

If we knew these women’s work at all, it was because it been collected and written down by those of a different class and/or gender, often subsumed into that artist’s own body of work. Was this simply what we call inspiration? Were these ballads and folk tales fair game for writers such as Burns, and composers such as Clarke? Were men like Burns and Clarke in fact performing a service for people who had not the agency to write their own stories, drawing attention to a culture beyond high classical traditions? Or was there something more insidious, more unjust, to the appropriation of oral folk and urban street culture into literate, establishment art?

These questions began to feed into the story of Murder Ballad. I had already been working on a plot that involved two women; Marie Eliza, a classical composer, and Isobel, a traditional street ballad singer. Both, I knew were destined to be frustrated by the gender prejudices of the era. I knew I wanted to deal with ideas of theft and appropriation in fairly blunt ways, and had been playing with the idea that Marie Eliza’s husband might casually, from time to time, pass off her work as his own. I also knew I wanted to involve a ballad collector, someone who plays fast and loose with the material he gathers, re-shaping it to suit his purposes. Somehow the seeds of violence would be set by these simmering resentments.

But it was too simple for me to pit the genders against one another. If anything it seemed that class was a stronger factor in the divide between oral and literate culture. What if, in that case, the composer Marie Eliza decided to use her musical literacy and agency to take a ballad taught to her by Isobel and re-make it as an opera? Would Isobel have the right to feel aggrieved, and what might she do in return?

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As I built the character of Isobel, I began to feel a simmering resentment myself, on behalf of women such as Betty Davidson, whose creativity had been absorbed and used without credit throughout the centuries. Davidson had possibly a more charitable soul than Isobel (or me); but what payback might a woman such as she have taken for the theft of her culture, given half the chance?

I wanted to lay these threads out in their messy tangles: a ballad singer, an opera composer, a husband jealous of his wife’s talent, a ballad collector only interested in his career. A murder plot that echoes the story of an ancient ballad, and a murder ballad that twists the truth into something else.

All of the artists in Murder Ballad are striving to create and elevate their own work in some way. Only some of them have more voice and agency to shape history and culture than others. Or so they believe.

MURDER BALLAD by Lucy Ribchester is out now (Black & White Publishing, £16.99 hardback)