Re-enchantment of Sex ballad

Ballad of the Lady and the Lusty Smith

Bide, lady, bide,
For there's nowhere you can hide;
For the lusty smith will be your love,
And he will lay your pride,
(Refrain to "The Twa Magicians," after the singing of A.L. Lloyd¹⁾

^{"Of course, it was originally a rape ballad." So a French cousin of "The Twa Magicians" (#44 in Francis Child's 1898 collection of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads²) provoked this apologetic introduction at a folk camp a few years ago, while the ballad to which I presume the singer referred (and to which A.L. Lloyd gave new life in 1966, fitting a new tune to long unsung words³) has been effectively driven off the performance stage.

"We don't sing it much anymore," Tony Barrand told me in an encouraging (lost) e-mail; apparently he and John Roberts found their audiences insistently hearing the song, and vociferously responding to it, as "rapist." And Child himself (perhaps more distressed by the ballad's explicit sexuality than its political message) introduces #44, with pointed distaste, as the "base-born cousin of a pretty ballad known all over Southern Europe and elsewhere, and in especially graceful forms in France." (I, p. 399)}

^{Now "The Twa Magicians" isn't especially graceful. It isn't pretty. But I hear it as a ballad of great sexual power, great magic. (So, obviously, do Barrand and Roberts, who included it in their early Folk Legacy LP, "Dark Ships in the Forest, ballads of the supernatural," which are also, as they say, ballads "of disconcerting power.") And I wonder if it doesn't, after all, tell a deeper story than its Gallic cousins -- prettily sentimental songs like the French song (provoking my original "rape ballad" comment) of "Si tu te mets anguille" or "If you became an eel," in which, after a play of purely imaginative pursuit-and-capture, the lady yields at last to her insistent wooer "because you love me so much."}

^{British balladry gives the story no such courtly twist. A shape-changing contest of intense physicality, it starts, in this "reborn" Northern version (Child's single text came from Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland), with the lady sitting "at her own front door, as straight as the willow wand," and replying to the man who says he intends to bed her,}

^{Away, you coal-black smith,
Would you do me this wrong,
For to think to have my maidenhead,
That I have kept so long?
I'd rather I was dead and cold
And my body laid in the grave,
Than a husky, dusky, coal-black smith
My maidenhead should have.}

^{In the song as I first met it in English Folk-Songs for Schools,⁵ the smith, "as black as any silk," doesn't say a word; he simply looks into the window at the lady "as white as any milk." And I learned as part of her protest, which is always of course the ballad refrain, an even longer list of insults for the "nasty, husky, dusky, musty, fusky, coal-black smith." Reacting with proper Victorian horror to his total "blackness" (clearly meant to evoke here, not race, but simple working-class dirt), she apparently sees him as the embodiment of the word so conspicuously avoided in her litany of protest -- an icon of the sexual vigor which is an essential part of Britain's "northern mystique" and especially associated with the coal-begrimed men who once worked, near naked, in the mines of Wales and northern England.}

^{In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell describes their "wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere,"⁶ and it must have been in hopes of viewing just such "noble bodies" (Orwell's words again) that Victorian ladies and gentlemen, we are told, once took excursion trains to Welsh mining towns and miners' wrestling contests.⁷ Wales, to be sure, is to the west, but as Britain stretches much farther north, with wealth and power long flowing from its impoverished northern reaches to London and the southern counties, the Celtic "homelands" of Wales and Cornwall share in this geo/political "mystique."⁸ Both the coal-mining "collier lad" and the hill-roaming "hieland laddie" stand in folkloric contrast to southern wealth and southern softness.}

^{And so does the coal-black smith. At least in British folksong, he, too, is clearly something of a male sex object. Sex writ large, sex mightily resisted, sex -- and not personal sentiment -- that prevails. For in every variant of Child 44 the lady yields to magical force, and she yields in a contest that isn't enclosed in hypothetical "ifs" either. Instead we hear in verse after verse, "she became . . . and he became . . ," over and over, and always with the same result:}

^{Then she became a hare,
   A hare all on the plain,
And he became a greyhound dog
   And fetched her back again.

Then she became a fly,
   A fly all in the air,
And he became a spider
   And fetched her to his lair.}

^{As hare or fly, ship or cloud or mulberry tree, she fails in her every evasion -- run down by a greyhound dog, boarded by a bold sea captain, zipped into by a lightning bolt, sprinkled by the morning dew... There are, to be sure, less "sexist" verses (dove and cock-pigeon flying "pair and pair") and newer verses too (from Portland comes "she became a bus and drove around the town, and he became a Metro pass and rode her round and round" while from Canada comes a "virtual" version of the ballad⁹). There is even an ending that turns the old refrain on its head -- i.e., where instead of:}

^{And once she woke, he took her so,
And still he bade her bide.
And the lusty smith became her love,
For all of her mighty pride.}

^{we hear:}

^{And once again he held her so,
   But still she would not bide;
And though he gained her maidenhead,
    He could not break her pride.

For she became a spider
   When the blacksmith became her mate;
And though he gained her maidenhead,
   The blacksmith then she ate.

Crying, bide, blacksmith;
   There's nowhere you can hide;
For though you gained my maidenhead,
   I've got you now inside.
(from the singing of Mrs. Brown, near Bournemouth¹⁰)}

^{This revised ending rescues the lady from any hint of sexual oppression, but I think it does so at a certain imaginative cost. Virginity in "The Twa Magicians" is clearly meant to be lost, and Mrs. Brown's way of seeing that "loss" has undeniable appeal. She answers the whole subject of our next chapter -- the matter of "power in bed" -- with a simple change of metaphor. But does she answer a troubling question or merely sidestep it?}

^{The unrevised ballad, blatantly highlighting a suspect erotic myth, intrigues me far more. It isn't much of a story really, more like a run-on sexual metaphor, and yet it's a story of disturbing erotic power that turns upside down the rules of romantic love, to say nothing of "meaningful relationship"! To the very end -- "and the lusty smith became her love for all of her mighty pride" -- the lady is not only presented as proud combatant; it's implied that her "love" follows the act of lovemaking,, i.e., that the term "lovemaking," often dismissed today as a euphemism, describes in fact a distinctively feminine truth.}

^{Of course "a distinctively feminine truth" -- I realize as soon as I say it! -- comes perilously close to evoking 19th-century notions of a masochistic female psychology, specifically, Helene Deutsch's conjectural picture of sex as an original "act of male violence that woman, being weaker, could not successfully resist" (italics mine) and presumably learned to "like" in a masochistic sort of daze. Feminists in popular circles¹¹ have rushed uncritically to embrace this conjecture (while blaming Deutsch for spreading what Brownmiller calls a "dictum of the hysterical, masochistic female") even as academics¹² clinch the case with a much quoted Hegelian dialectic of power" proving, it is said, that "every master must have a slave." (By "proved" I think they mean that the relation is embedded in logical discourse -- that, as we like to say, it "stands to reason.")}

^{Personally I find it an insulting conjecture, an insulting rush to victimhood. Yet the ballad, somehow, does not insult me as do these academic arguments purportedly mounted on my behalf. However unsettling the "feminine truth" that this ballad of overpowering, magical male might propounds -- and there is something more than a little unsettling here, as well as something of an erotic cliche -- "The Twa Magicians" shows two mighty magicians. It celebrates the lady's "defeat" but not, I think, her degradation, and that critical central action is painted in no ho-hum terms of simple physical weakness, or indeed of weakness at all. It is still mighty mystery and not the foregone conclusion of a rigged wrestling match that the ballad celebrates, at least as I read, or rather, hear it. And my hearing is confirmed in other old ballads of applauded sexual conflict -- other old ballads of applauded "sexism," if you will, that end on a note of life-affirming female triumph.}

^{Tone-deaf logicians may take "The Twa Magicians" as an illustration of Brownmiller's "masculine ideology of rape." A vindication even of Andrea Dworkin's argument that in our patriarchal Western culture, sex, at heart, is rape. But I think the old ballads are celebrating something more interesting and a lot more complicated than sexual oppression -- say rather a pre-courtly "romance of the body" -- and that what they are saying is a matter of more than folkloric interest.}