General Interest Review 00007

The Trees They Do Grow High

"The Trees They Do Grow High" is an English folk ballad that first appeared in the 1700s. With the folk music resurgence in the 60s the song was reawakened, and is now available widely mainly because of recordings by Joan Baez and Martin Carthy.

The song is a genuine example of why English ballads cast such a long, ominous shadow on people who are willing to give them some attention. In the lyrics and aching movement of the melody is conveyed the simultaneous pull of longing and powerlessness that takes up so much of a life lived in a culture that oppresses personal liberty. The ballad is told from the point of view of a 24-year-old girl married off by her father to a 14-year-old boy. She frets about how young he is, expressing anger at her father, who has "married me to a boy who is too young." Her father retorts, in the next verse, that the boy is of noble blood, revealing the true reason for the match. In the refrain she states that "He's young but he's daily growing," showing in a burst of lyrical brilliance that she has submitted some form of resignation that her own life is out of her control. From there, it is suggested that she made amends by taking him as a lover, only to see him go off to battle and die.

Like the refrain, the story is delivered in a taut poetic narrative, that asks the listener to interpret the lines, and, at the same time, feel fully the emotions the narrator lays bare. With each listen it is possible to come away on the side of a different character -- whether it be the narrator and the way her life has been pre-ordained for her, the father and his hope that his daughter will be looked after, or the boy himself, who probably has little idea of the weight of any of this at 14.

So often stories from the times of kings and courts are about the rise or fall (or rise and fall) of ambitious people. They are the epic tails of people who either tried to define their own age (Henry VIII, Elizabeth I) or deviate from the norms of that era with revolutionary abandon (Napoleon, any period character Mel Gibson has played). This story reminds us that a faceless woman possessed of little courage can tell us just as much about history as anyone who was so lucky as to have been written about in a book.