A was inserted in the fourth volume of The Tea-Table Miscellany, and stands in the edition of 1763 at p. 321, 'Rare Willie drowned in Yarrow,' It is given in Herd's Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 197 (with two or three trifling changes); in Johnson's Museum, p. 542, No 525. F is epitomized in Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs, I, 66, "with some changes from the way the editor has heard it sung."
The fragment in Cromek's Select Scotish Songs, 1810, II, 196, sent by Burns in a letter to William Tytler, 1790, belongs, as already said, mostly with 'The Duke of Athole's Nurse,' but has two stanzas of 'Willie drowned in Yarrow' (B).
'The Braes of Yarrow,' Ritson's Scotish Song, I, 154, composed upon the story of this ballad by the Rev. John Logan (1748-88), has two of the original lines (nearly):
They sought him east, they sought him west, They sought him all the forest thorough.
Willie is drowned in Yarrow according to the older (southern) tradition, A; also B, C. In the northern copies, D, E, F, with which G, H, agree, the scene is transferred to Gamrie, on the coast of the Moray Frith, where, as Christie remarks, "there is no water that Willie could have been drowned in but the sea, on his way along the sands to the old kirk."[foot-note] In the ballad which follows this, a western variety of the same story, Willie is drowned in the Clyde.
C 2, 3, 5, 6, belong to the preceding ballad, and 4 is common to that and this.
A 2 would come in better at the end of the story (as it does in C, a copy of slight authority), if it might properly find a place anywhere in the ballad. But this stanza suits only a woman who has been for some time living with her husband. A woman on her wedding-day could have no call to make her bed broad in her mother's house, whether yestreen or the morrow. I therefore conclude that A 2 does not belong to this ballad.[foot-note]
D-H. Rare Willie has promised to marry Meggie, E (also A, C, D). His mother would give her the wale of all her other sons, but not Willie; she will have him only; D, E (cf. G 1). The bridegroom, with a large company, is mounted to ride for the bride; he tells his friends to go forward, he has forgotten to ask his mother's blessing; D, E, F, H. He receives the blessing, D, F, H; her blessing goes not with him, G; he gets her heavy curse, E; even in F his mother, after giving her blessing, says that he will never see his wedding. (The mother's curse is the characteristic feature of the next following ballad.) The bridal party come to the river, or burn, of Gamrie; all the others pass the stream safely, but Willie is washed from his saddle, D-H. The rest ride on to the kirk of Gamrie. The bride asks where is the man who was to marry her, and is told that Willie is drowned. She tears the ribbons from her hair and runs to the river, plunges in, and finds Willie in the deepest pot, the middle, the deepest weil. She will make her bed with him in Gamrie; both mothers shall be alike sorry; D-G.
In H, Willie's horse comes home with an empty saddle. His mother is sure that her son is dead; her daughter tries in vain to persuade her that all is well; Meggie takes her lover's body from the river and lays it on the grass; she will sleep with him in the same grave at Gamrie.
In A, B, the drowned body is found in the cleft of a rock, the clifting or clintin of a craig; in C 4 neath a buss of brume, that stanza belonging, as most of the copy does, to the preceding ballad; cf. J 14, K 11 of No 214. The bride ties three links of her hair, which is three quarters long, round Willie's waist, and draws him out of the water, B 2, C 5; for the hair, cf. No 214, where also it is not advantageously used. The bride's tearing the ribbons from her head, D 12, E 15, F 8, G 7, H 14, is found also in No 214, D 11, I 12, but is inappropriate there. A brother, brother John, whether the man's or the woman's, tells the bad news in No 214, A 11, E 9, I 8, L 11, N 9, 10, as here D 11, E 14, F 7, G 6, H 13.
'Annan Water,' a ballad in which a lover is drowned on his way to visit his mistress, is given in an appendix.
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