Since 2009 The Folk Orc has been running sessions with the aim of getting more people playing music with the emphasis on playing music together. In these sessions we have explored over one hundred songs and tunes. Most of them have been traditional, some not, a lot of them English but there is a strong contingent from Scotland, Ireland and America too. It is not on purpose that we seem to have missed out Wales, an imbalance that I will endeavor to rectify in the future, as well as exploring the vast collection of folk songs from around the world. For now though, we have a sizable collection of songs and I feel it is time to sort through them. So each month we will be looking at one of those songs which out of experience we have deemed to be a good session song. A good session song is - not exclusively - relatively easy to play, has a simple melody that can be sung by all and rollocks along like a clipper in a good wind. There are exceptions to this, but most of these songs will certainly employ at least one of these attributes. So without further ado, let's get on with introducing the first of these songs: Unquiet Grave.
Counted among the 10 most disturbing folk songs in history by the BBC in 2016, the Unquiet Grave is a fairly horrific tale, depending on how you read it of course. It is either a grim tale of a young man's obsession leading him to commit heinous acts with a corpse or a poignant song about the relationship between love and grief. You can make up your own mind on that.
A brief synopsis of the story is as follows:
Our protagonist is a man whose girlfriend has been murdered and left in the woods. Understandably miffed by this course of events he decides to sit on her grave and feel sorry for himself for exactly one year and a day.* At the end of this lengthy attempt to be the world's best goth, he appears unsurprised when the ghost of his beloved appears to him and essentially asks the question that is on everybody's mind, which is: “what the bleedin’ hell are you still doing here? Would you please let me get some sleep?” It is his reply to this seemingly reasonable query where the truly disturbing element of this tale appears; “I want to dig you up and give you a kiss,” is the premise of his retort. Despite being dead his Mrs still has some sense and tries to put him off the idea by announcing to him that if he were to kiss the decomposed remains of her body then he would likely die too. This obviously does not worry him and she has to take another tack to dissuade her lover. Rather than appeal to his common sense she decides to trick him and agrees that she will give him a kiss but only if he collects three seemingly impossible things to find: firstly a note from a dungeon deep, which could be taken in a few ways. A note as in the sound of a dungeon is one possible interpretation, or it could be a note similar to that you would get from your parents allowing you to sit out of PE; in this case though a note from a dungeon master stating that you are allowed to kiss your long dead love interest. Secondly, water from a stone, which surprisingly, is probably the easiest of the three things to achieve. You could count water from any spring or cave ceiling as water from stone, just about, it all depends on how pedantic your murdered lovers' ghosts are. Then the third item, milk, white from a maiden's breast when a man she had never known. Well, there are several logistical problems with this one so I think we can safely say that our protagonist here will not be kissing his lover any time soon. Wrong, the last line of the song states quite clearly that his lover is laying in a quiet grave. Meaning that he somehow managed to find a dungeon note, stone water and unfathomable milk, brought it back to her, dug her up and gave her a snog. The song does not detail this journey in depth, which is a shame.
Do you have a different interpretation of the song? Comment below if you do. Maybe you have an idea of how our man managed to gather the items requested by his lover, or do you think that he failed that task and that she was left in a quiet grave due to him giving up and getting on with his life? As with all traditional songs, there are of course many versions with differing titles and slightly differing lyrics that demonstrate how any song can be interpreted in different ways. There are versions of this song that include a wilting rose or flower and others where the gender roles are reversed. There are even some versions that inexplicably cut the story short, the guy says to his dead wife that he wants to kiss her and when she points out that he would likely die from the smell of her breath he goes, “well, fair enough then” and leaves.
*It is unlikely to be a coincidence that this happens to be the length of time that a hand-fasting is said to last. Hand-fasting traditions come from the Germanic tribes that entered Scandinavia and Britain. They were often seen as a kind of temporary marriage, much like we use an engagement nowadays and were common in Britain up until tudor times. The interesting thing about handfastings appearing in folk songs is that it gives a nod to pre-christian belief systems and shows one of many customs from these early days surviving through a heavily christianised society. This is true of much of what we see as folk customs and tradition.
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