The Laird o'Drum

3. The Laird o'Drum 4:21
Child 236, Roud 247;
Traditional, arrangement by Wendy Grossman
Publishing administration by Riverlark Music (BMI)

For more information, contact:
Andy Cohen, Riverlark Music
Email: twangoleum@outlook.com

I think this was the first real ballad I ever learned. It came from the singing of George and Vaughan Ward, who played it at a Cornell Folk Song Club concert around 1974; they learned it from the Scottish source singer Elizabeth Stewart (1939-2022), whose family were famed for their knowledge of balladry and folklore. The ballad is based on a true story: the laird in question, Alexander Irvine, the 11th Laird of Drum, was first married to the somewhat aloof and aristocratic Mary Gordon, and, after she died, chose for his second wife Margaret Couts, a 16-year-old shepherdess. That part is creepy by modern standards: he was 63 at the time.

What I like about the ballad, though, is her father's insistence that she be treated as a wife and not a servant, and her own post-marital insistence, despite his family's snobbery (here represented by his brother John) that they were equal - the last verse, unusually, gives the woman the final word. In real life, the marriage lasted six years until he died in 1687 and produced four children.