The Bonny blade, or Dumb wife; together with Roseline Castle

The Bonny Blade relates an amusing story. A young husband marries a wife skilled in housework but unable to talk. He implores a doctor to cure her of the handicap. The doctor complies and the woman becomes a chattering scold. Beseeching the doctor to undo his work, the husband is told

’Tis beyond the art of man.
Let him do the best he can,
To make a scolding woman hold her tongue.

It appeared on a Roxburghe broadside of about 1678 and may derive from a passage from François Rabelais. John Ashton gives the song in ten verses (the Coverly version has eight) as “The Dumb Maid; or, The Young Gallant Trapann’d,” “to a new tune call’d ‘Dum, Dum, Dum’ or ‘I Would I Were in My Own Countrey’” (Ashton 99; Simpson 331-35; Cazden, Haufrecht, and Studer, Folk Songs 497-503). G. Malcolm Laws cites many collected editions of this song; the text appeared in three songsters between 1790 and 1815 (Laws Q5; Roud; R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources). Norman Cazden suggests that traditional versions of the song reported in the United States may all derive from printed copies and that “it remains likely that many more singers know the ditty than would care to acknowledge it, at least when their wives are present” (Cazden, Haufrecht, and Studer, Folk Songs 498).

As for a tune, a variant of the seventeenth-century English tune, “I Am the Duke of Norfolk” or “Paul’s Steeple,” bears the alternate title “I Would I Were in My Own Countrey.” This same tune appears with the “Bonny Blade” text in Thomas D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth. While the lyric has not survived with this tune in oral tradition, it could be an appropriate match for 1814 as D’Urfey’s collection was known in eighteenth-century America.

The beautiful pastoral love song, “Roseline Castle,” was written by Richard Hewitt (d. 1764) of Cumberland, England, amanuensis to the blind Scottish poet, Dr. Thomas Blacklock (1721-91). While the elaborate tune with its wide tessitura has been credited to James Oswald, its earliest appearance was in a Collection of Scots Tunes by William McGibbon as “The House of Glams” ([1746] 2:31). Oswald published the tune in his Caledonian Pocket Companion as “Roselana Castle” and Hewitt’s text appeared with the music in Oswald’s Collection of 1761 (4:3; 16-17). In the 1780s and 1790s the song was widely known in America and copied by many young people into their song collections. Curiously, the rather sophisticated tune became popular among American fifers toward the end of the Revolutionary War and was used into the early nineteenth century as a dead march. The text appeared in twenty-six songsters between 1785 and 1820 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).

The castle from the song’s title is in Scotland, southwest of Edinburgh, the location of the Battle of Rosline, a Scots victory over the English on February 24, 1303 (Shuldham-Shaw, Lyle, and Hunter 1:#111).