“Geordie” is an English language folk song concerning the trial of the eponymous hero whose lover pleads for his life. It is listed as Child No. 209 and No. 90 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The ballad was traditionally sung across the English speaking world, and was performed with many different melodies and lyrics. In recent times, popular versions have been performed and recorded by numerous artists and groups in different languages, mostly inspired by Joan Baez’s 1962 recording based on a traditional version from Somerset.
There are two distinct and for the most part separate variants of this song, one deriving from 17th century English broadsides and sung by traditional singers in England, Ireland and North America, the other printed in one 18th and some 19th century ballad collections and collected from Scottish singers and some North American singers. Steve Roud and Julia Bishop (New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs) comment that in Scottish versions Geordie tends to be released, while in English ones his lady “has “come too late” and he is executed.
In the Scottish version a man is killed in battle and Geordie is to be executed. When his lady hears of this she calls for horses to ride with her household to the court in Edinburgh, sometimes by way of Queensferry, where sometimes she has her horse swim the Firth of Forth. Sometimes she distributes gold to poor people as she goes. Arriving in the town, she sees her husband being brought to the headsman’s block. She begs the king for Geordie’s life, offering estates and her children in return, but the king orders the hangman to make haste. Sometimes there is discussion about Geordie’s fate between lords. Sometimes men of the Gordon clan show readiness to fight. An old man suggests the king accept money for Geordie’s release, and a large and sufficient sum is gathered from the crowd. He is released and the couple say complimentary things.
A narrator coming (usually) over London Bridge (but sometimes elsewhere) hears a young woman lamenting for Geordie. She says he will be hung in style because he was of royal blood and loved a good woman. She calls for horses to ride to London (or somewhere else). She pleads that Geordie’s crimes weren’t serious, in that he only stole some of the king’s deer and sold them (in Bohenny, Davy, Kilkenny and so on), and says she would give up a variable number of children to save his life. In some versions there is discussion between lawyers. The judge sometimes says that she’s too late and always that he cannot pardon Geordie. Sometimes Geordie has time to say goodbye to his friends and his wife. Sometimes one or the other wishes he or she were on “yonder Hill” with weapons to “Fight for the life of Geordie”. Often we hear again that his execution will be luxurious.
The earliest known publication of a variant of this song is a London black-letter broadside “The Life and Death of George of Oxford” dating from between 1672 and 1696, though an earlier broadside from between 1601 and 1640, ‘A lamentable new ditty, made upon the death of a worthy gentleman, named George Stoole : dwelling sometime on Gate-side Moore, and sometime at Newcastle in Northumberland: with his penitent end. To a delicate Scottish tune’ has “a rhythm and rhyming scheme that connects it to “Geordie”, and includes some key verbal similarities.
One of, if not the, earliest recordings is a 1907 performance by Joseph Taylor, collected on wax cylinder by the musicologist Percy Grainger in that year. It Louisa “Louie” Hooper (1860-1946) of Langport, Somerset sang a haunting version in 1942, on which Joan Baez based her popular version. There are three versions, all called “Georgie”, in the “Max Hunter Folk Song Collection” at Missouri State University: from Rhonnda Hayes of Irving, Texas; Joan O’Bryant of Wichita, Kansas and Charles Strayer Jr. of Sarcoxie, Missouri; in all these versions, either “the oldest lawyer at the bar” or “Georgie’s own lawyer”, says that he is condemned by his own confession, an interesting local variant.
