Eighteenth century Scots, one of the ballads collected by Francis James Child. Of the many versions I’ve heard I love best Olivia Chaney singing with Offa Rex. The story goes like this: The King, returning from a long war in Spain, finds his daughter Janet pregnant, not by some acceptable noble of the court but by a commoner, Willie of Winsbury. Janet pleads loneliness during her father’s absence, but the King is unmoved. He commands Willie brought before him to be hanged. We think we know where this is going from a dozen similar scenarios. But when the King beholds the captive “clad in the red silk,” his hair like strands of gold and skin white as milk, he confesses Willie’s desirability to Janet—
If I were a woman as I am a man
My bedfellow you should have been
—spares him and then offers Willie his daughter’s hand in marriage, which he accepts, and the Kingdom, which he does not. In an act of touching humility the comely Willie chooses to make Janet “the lady of as much land / As she shall ride in a long summer’s day.”
The song works on us like the sun on a buried rose garden. Beauty in us recognizes itself in beauty in the world, and is honored by the honoring of that beauty. In this song beauty thwarts death, and the man in me feels honored that it’s a male beauty, so thoroughly have we been exiled from the palace of the aesthetic to the workshop of the utilitarian.
At the end of the song, Chaney slows the last line, lingering softly on the word “day” before lifting it into some more complicated realm of feeling. In Willie’s winning of Janet is also a hard-to-define sadness. It’s the melancholy at Solstice when summer light begins its ordained descent, our knowledge that the days will shudder down to winter and darkness, a reality of which the old Celtic cultures were so cognizant. I hear that in the haunting way Chaney draws out those final notes and etherealizes them, as if unwilling to let go of them, unwilling to let go of the “long summer day.” Against a pullulating, insistent acoustic guitar and bass, Chaney’s voice turns the song into both a defense of beauty and a lament for its brevity. Willie embodies a perfection of the flesh that in its moment in the sun appears a triumph of youthful attraction. Despite its happy resolution, the song knows the odds of successfully pleading beauty’s case to the Hanging King of our experience of Time, the root of “Willie”‘s subtle but palpable melancholy.
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—Thomas R. Smith
Picture Rupert Loydell
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