The birch comes from a tree that grows at the gates of Paradise. Conventionally birch protects the living from the dead not the other way round. The children are dead but wear birch wood. When, around Martinmas, the children return to their mother they do so as revenants, not, as she hoped, "in earthly flesh and blood", and it is a bleak affair. The song implicitly draws on an old belief that one should mourn a death for a year and a day, for any longer may cause the dead to return it has this in common with the ballad " The Unquiet Grave". "I wish the wind may never cease, Nor flashes in the flood, Till my three sons come home to me, In earthly flesh and blood." The woman grieves bitterly for the loss of her children, cursing the winds and sea. The ballad concerns a woman from Usher's Well, who sends her three sons away, to school in some versions, and a few weeks after learns that they had died. In the first half of the twentieth century many more versions were collected in America. Cecil Sharp collected songs from Britain but had to go the Appalachian Mountains to locate this ballad. William Motherwell also printed a version in "Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern" (1827). ![]() ![]() The Scottish tune is quite different from the English tune, and America produced yet another tune. They were notated from an old woman in West Lothian. An incomplete version appeared in Sir Walter Scott's "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (1802). " The Wife of Usher's Well" is a traditional ballad, catalogued as Child Ballad 79 and number 196 in the Roud Folk Song Index. Traditional song The Wife of Usher's Well
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