Genre Folk song | ||
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The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry or The Grey Selkie of Suleskerry is a traditional folk song from Orkney. The song was collected by the American scholar, Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century and is listed as Child ballad number 113. There are many different versions of the song, one of which is a part of the epic ballad, The Lady Odivere.
Contents
Synopsis
A woman, nursing a baby, laments that she does not know the child's father or where he lives. A man rises up to tell her that he is the father, and that he is a silkie — a changeling that takes the form of a man on the land and a seal in the sea, and that he lives on a remote rocky island called Sule Skerry. He gives her a purse full of gold, takes his son, and predicts that she will marry a gunner (the man who fires the harpoon on a whaling ship) who will shoot both him and their son.
Lyrics
An interpolated 5th stanza has also been heard:
Meaning of scots dialect words
Adaptations
The best known tune today is non-traditional, having been written by Jim Waters in 1954. Child was interested only in the texts of the ballads he collected, and Jim explains that the tune was "just the best I could do as a way to get a fine ballad sung". Over the next two years, he introduced the ballad to the Boston area at a time when "hootnannies" filled the Great Court of MIT on a weekly basis (before recorded folk songs were widely available). Jim Butler added the song to his repertoire, according to his notes, in October 1954, on a page labelled "MITOC Supp.", being the MIT Outing Club addition to his typewritten Child Ballads. Butler taught the song to several people, including Bonnie Dobson. This is the tune that Joan Baez popularized as "Silkie" in the early 1960s.
Although Jean Redpath disparaged Water's tune as "phony", preferring a longer version of Child 113 to another tune, by 1965, Jim Butler had heard Waters' tune sung by a Scottish student at the University of British Columbia, unaccompanied in the traditional style, and under the impression that he had learned it from his grandfather. "This has to be one of the most flattering things that has ever happened to me", added Waters, who eventually copyrighted his version and assigned it to Folk Legacy Records. Folk Legacy reassigned all copyright interest to James Waters in August, 2012.
The original tune was preserved by Dr. Otto Andersson who heard it sung by John Sinclair on the island of Flotta, Orkney. Dr Andersson said, “I had no idea at the time that I was the first person to write down the tune. The pure pentatonic form of it and the beautiful melodic line showed me that it was a very ancient melody that I had set on paper.”
American folksinger Pete Seeger set the poem "I Come and Stand at Every Door" by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet to the tune of "The Great Silkie". The American rock band The Byrds sang it on their third album, Fifth dimension (1966). The song was later covered by This Mortal Coil. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds later recorded the song with its original lyrics as part of his Folk Den project.