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LUCY WAN (Roud 234, Child 51)
This ballad makes no attempt to paint over the human potential for darkness and destruction. I learned this unusual version from the signing of the great Ewan MacColl, via YouTube. Also known as Lizie Wan, or Fair Lizzie, or Rosie Anne, this song was collected by Francis James Child, and included by Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L Lloyd in their Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959). Ella Bull and W. Percy Merrick collected the song in 1904 from Mrs Charlotte Dann of Cottenham, Cambridgeshire. Kate Bush wrote her own version of this ballad, which she re-titled as The Kick Inside (1978).

lyrics

Fair Lucy she sits in her father's bower,
A-weeping and making moan
When by there came her own brother dear,
What ails thee, Lucy Wan?

O I ail, and I ail dear brother, she cried,
And I'll tell you the reason why.
There is a child between my two sides
That's for you, dear brother, and I.

O he's taken up his good broadsword
That hung down by his knee,
And he's cut off fair Lucy Wan's head,
And her poor body in three.

O I've cut the head off my greyhound,
And I pray you'll pardon me.
O that is not the blood of our greyhound,
But the blood of our Lucy.

O what will you do when your father comes to know,
My son, come tell unto me?
I'll go and dress myself in a new suit of blue,
And set sail for a far country.

And what will you do with your houses and your land,
My son, come tell unto me?
O I shall leave them all to my children so small,
By one, by two, by three.

And when shall you turn to your own wife again,
My son, come tell unto me?
When the sun and the moon meet over yonder hill,
And I hope that that will never, never be.

credits

from The Brown Girl and Other Folk Songs, released May 1, 2022
Trad. Arr: Angeline Morrison
Vocals: Angeline Morrison

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Angeline Morrison and The Ambassadors of Sorrow

"Bewitching and otherworldly... Morrison's voice is eerily confiding, strangely present, insistent even at its quietest" Folk Radio UK.

Believing in the beauty of sad songs, weaving folk, soul and beat sounds of the '60s into a tapestry of the human heart. Homespun sounds that reside in a nostalgic universe.

"Dark, unsettling folk that verges on the hymnal" BBC Introducing. ... more

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