Lowlands Away

http://www.vimeo.com/10953681

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For the second day in a row I awake to a sad women’s lament. A common enough experience in my life but today the anguish is coming from outside my window. Susan Philipsz begins her art installation underneath the George V Bridge opposite my city croft as part of the Glasgow International Festival.

Essentially this consists of her fairly inoffensive voice singing a refrain from Lowlands Away via a recording and tannoy speakers fixed underneath the great stone spans. Lowlands Away is an old traditional sailor’s song and has been sung by everyone from Nick Cave to The Corries to Rufus Wainwright & Kate McGarrigle. Another loop plays at a bridge a bit further down and possibly another, out of my earshot, further up.

The song is a bit of a mystery. It has often been found in tradition in Britain and USA but always as a sailor shanty, usually sung while working at the pumps. Two distinct sets of words accompany the tune: one speaks for the view of the dead sailor, the other his lover left behind. Another version tells the present story of the dead lover who returns; while the other concerns the work and pay of cotton-lumbers in the port of Mobile, Alabama. Deceived by the latter version, some specialists declare it to be a Negro song. More likely, it’s a fragment of an Anglo-Scots ballad, full form forgotten, that lived on among British seamen who passed it on to longshoremen in the Gulf ports. The “Lowlands” refrain may be an echo from the old ballad of The Golden Vanity. Captain Whall, best of the pioneer shanty collectors, says that in Liverpool in the old days a crew of merchant seaman was often spoken of as “the Johns” so the term “my John” in the ballad is no more personal than “my lad”.

It’s ridiculously melancholy, worse still when it echoes under the stone bridges of the Clyde where hundreds of people have jumped in and ended their lives over the years or set off on ships to war. I suspect it will be driving me crazy by the end of its tenure, it starts at 10am and runs until 8pm every day at twenty minute intervals. It could be worse, I like folk music and have a soft spot for the maritime songs but I thought it was the artist who was supposed to suffer for their art…

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LOWLANDS AWAY (Dead sailor version)

I dreamt a dream the other night

Ch. Lowlands, lowlands, away my John

I dreamt a dream the other night

My lowlands, away.

I dreamt I saw my own true love,

He stood so still, he did not move,

[Alternative line: His hair was wet, his eyes above]

I knew my love was drowned and dead,

He stood so still, no word he said.

All dank his hair, all dim his eye,

I knew that he had said goodbye.

All green and wet with weeds so cold,

Around his form green weeds had hold.

‘I’m drowned in the Lowland Seas,’ he said,

‘Oh, you an’ I will ne’er be wed.’

‘I shall never kiss you more,’ he said,

‘Never kiss you more — for I am dead.’

‘I will cut my breasts until they bleed.’

His form had gone — in the green weed.

My love is drowned in the windy Lowlands,

‘I will cut away my bonnie hair,

No other man will think me fair.’

I bound the weeper round my head,

For now I knew my love was dead.

My love is drowned in the windy Lowlands…

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