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lady Gay [The Wife of Usher's Well, Child 79].

I learned my version of the song from my father, Luke Faust, who learned it from a recording of Buell Kazee with additional verses from somewhere else, [his mind perhaps?]. Maggie and Sherman Hammons sing a beautiful version of it but I have stubbornly maintained my dad's version because of my attachment to the haunting and lovely banjo accompaniment he made to go with it.
This is a most mysterious story and I have read some complex Freudian explanations of it but its main appeal to me lies in the eventual triumph of the children over their mother. After all she sent them away. Even with the best of intentions it is still a painful rejection. She sends her three children away to learn their grammarie. (These were the days when people were very suspicious of those who could read and write, believing them to have magical powers, hence the word grammar came to be interchangeable with whitch craft. ) Within six months they die. Later on she sees them coming home and lays the table with the best finery. They tell her they cannot, or will not eat and drink. They are dead and besides, they have better things now. She rejects them. They reject her. Therein lies the songs satisfaction. It is the roosters supernatural duty to crow just before dawn when the time has run out for the earthly visit of the ghosts. Before the children leave they convey the final unsympathetic message to their mother that they are definitely dead and her continuing grief prevents them from gaining peace.

lyrics

Lady Gay

There was a lady and a lady gay,
Of children she had three,
She sent them away to the North Countree
To learn their grammaree

They'd not been gone but a very short time,
Scarcely three weeks and a day,
When death, cruel death, came hasting along
And stole those babes away.

It was just about old Christmas time
The night being cold and clear
She looked and she saw her three little babes
Come running home to her

She's set a table both long and wide
And on it she put bread and wine -
Come eat, come drink, my three little babes
Come eat, come drink of mine

We cannot eat your bread, mother
Neither can we drink your wine
For yonder stands our Savior dear
And to Him we must resign

She made a bed in the highest room,
On it she put a cloth of gold,
And all the night she kept the fire
To keep her babes from cold.

The eldest one sat awake in bed
Rooster crowing for the dawn
Awake awake my two little brothers
Awake we must be gone

"Green grass is over our heads, mother,
Cold clay is over our feet,
And every tear you shed for us,
It wets our winding-sheet."

credits

from Green Are The Woods, released June 13, 1999
Learned from my father Luke Faust ,via Buell Kazee

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Helena Triplett Faust Wellington, New Zealand

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