Lord Thomas and Fair Ellendar
Photograph copyright Rob Amberg 2020. Photograph courtesy of the Photographer.
This is my FAVORITE Rob Amberg print taken on the front porch of Slick’s store. The store was on what was then my grandfather’s property but run by a man named Clarence Gunter. The ruins of this store are on what is now my property, covered in kudzu and slowly sliding down the bank. I bought this print from Rob and have been trying to convince him, since then, to come and do a Sodom Laurel Album Revisited…we are still characters over here and the comparisons would be FACINATING.
Lord Thomas and Fair Ellendar is one of the more EPIC ballads for a number of reasons. LTaFE is one of the few ballads in this series that I knew prior to beginning the project.
LTaFE is a little more, as Mother says, long-winded. Most of the ballads are kindly short because, well, sometimes there really CAN be too much of a good thing. Not that I want to state the obvious or anything, but most folks, especially nowadays, have a pretty short attention span. With so much entertaining information flashing out at us from screens everywhere we look, a ballad has to be something pretty darn special to capture even a moment of the average person’s time. Arcane poetry from hundreds of years ago sang in a minor tune without music and most likely out of key is a hard sell on the best of days. As I have said in the past, ballads are what you would call ‘an acquired taste.’
I fell in love with the story in Lord Thomas and Fair Ellendar early on and learned it almost without trying to. The biggest issue was figuring out how to control my breath…which is harder than it sounds. The collected version in Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians is … pretty close to the one that I remember. I found a beautiful version online in a German collection and I absolutely love some of the extra verses that puts some flesh on the story as a whole. https://ingeb.org/songs/lordthom.html . I especially like verses 1,2, 3, 4 7, and 15.
1. Lord Thomas was a bold forester
And the lodge-keeper of the king's deer;
Fair Ellender was a lady gay,
Lord Thomas, he loved her dear.
2. Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender
Sat all day on a hill;
When night had come, and sun was gone,
They'd not yet said their fill.
3. Lord Thomas spoke a word in jest
And Ellen took it ill:
"Oh, I will never marry me a wife
Against my family's will."
4. "If you will never wed thee a wife
A wife will never wed thee!"
So he rode home to tell his mother
And knelt upon his knee.
7. He dressed himself all in his best,
His merry men all in white;
And every town that he passed through
They took him to be some knight.
15. She turned around and dressed in white
Her sisters dressed in green,
And every town that they rode through
They took her to be some queen.
Mother says that Cas felt that Lord Thomas and Fair Ellendar was an especially important ballad to pass down. She remembers learning this song one day when she was 16 or 17 years old and she was driving Cas to Marshall. The verses to the song are woven into the curves, climbs, and drops as they clung to the sides of the mountains on the winding road. Mother says she can’t cross over Davis Hill without thinking of this song and can hear Cas singing it clear as day. Another favorite memory mother has about Cas singing Lord Thomas and Fair Ellendar at Jonesboro….but that is a story for HER to tell.
The story of my relationship with Lord Thomas and Fair Ellendar is wrought with hilarious little moments. Given that I loved this song from the start, it is not hard to imagine that I misunderstood much of what was going on in the story due to my being a TODDLER. Let’s start with the first line, “Mother, O Mother, come riddle my sport.” To me, this referred to an active, sport type competition wherein riddles (the word kind) played a big part. When “…they took him to be some king,” and “…they took her to be some queen,” I thought this meant that many different locals from many different villages physically TOOK them to the courthouse to make them a king or a queen. I felt this to be unreasonable because they were on their way somewhere and how in the world did they have enough time to be made a queen, rule for even a little while, and still make the wedding on time. When Lord Thomas takes Fair Ellendar by the lily white hand and leads her across the hall, I saw a ranch style home where a bedroom and a bathroom might be ‘across the hall’ from each other. My favorite, and most mysterious, though, was the brown girl. In reality, this is a reference to when the Normans overthrew the Saxons, and a slightly more swarthy bunch had taken over and the ‘fair’ folk were no longer the ruling class. In my mind, she was an African Princess in full feathery regalia prancing about and stealing another woman’s man. She was more beautiful and interesting to me than Fair Ellendar and I never understood why Lord Thomas did not love her more from the start. From the mouth of babes… Even though I know now that to ‘riddle my sport’ is to tell me what to do and to ‘take her to be some queen’ is really just THINKING that someone is a queen, I still see the brown girl as an African Princess!