British folk music has produced some remarkably gruesome songs, filled with murder, betrayal, drowning, execution and the occasional return from the grave. Few are quite as nasty as Cruel Mother, a traditional ballad which has been sung in various forms for more than three centuries.
The story concerns a young woman who becomes pregnant, gives birth secretly in the woods and murders her two newborn children. She hides their bodies, but later encounters two children playing and gradually discovers they are the ghosts of the babies she killed.
Nobody knows when Cruel Mother was originally written, although versions of the story can be traced back to the late 17th century. One of its earliest printed relatives was The Duke’s Daughter’s Cruelty, published in London by Jonah Deacon and probably dating from the 1680s or 1690s.
The broadside told how a woman murdered two infants and buried them in a forest to conceal her shame. Importantly for horror fans, its title also advertised the “wonderful apparition” of the murdered children, meaning the ghosts were already part of the story.
Over the following centuries, the ballad travelled through Britain and Ireland under titles including The Cruel Mother, The Greenwood Side and Fine Flowers in the Valley. David Herd published a Scottish version in Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs in 1776, while numerous other versions survived through oral tradition.
Francis James Child later included the song as Child Ballad No. 20 in his great 19th-century collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Folklorists now also catalogue it as Roud Folk Song Index No. 9, covering the many versions collected from different singers.
There is no definitive set of lyrics, although one traditional Scottish version begins with a deceptively beautiful description of the birth:
She leaned her back unto a thorn,
Fine flowers in the valley;
And there she has her two babes born,
And the green leaves they grow rarely.
Things quickly become considerably nastier when the mother produces the weapon she has brought with her:
She took the ribbon frae her hair,
And bound their bodies fast and sair.She took the penknife frae her side,
And she has pierced their hearts so wide.
Later, the mother encounters two beautiful children and tells them how splendidly she would dress them if they belonged to her. Unfortunately, they reveal that they are her murdered children and know perfectly well what their mother did to them.
Some versions become even more bizarre when the ghosts describe the supernatural punishments awaiting her, involving thousands of years of suffering before Hell. Several of these verses probably migrated from another traditional ballad, The Maid and the Palmer, which Child catalogued as Ballad No. 21.
Cruel Mother survived well into the recording age and became popular again during the British and American folk revivals. Shirley Collins recorded it in 1959, while Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger all performed versions.
Steeleye Span later gave the old nightmare a folk-rock treatment on their 1989 album Tempted and Tried, proving the story still had life centuries after its first appearance.
It is easy to understand why Cruel Mother has lasted, because underneath the changing words and melodies sits a wonderfully simple horror story. A woman commits murder, hides the evidence and believes her secret is safe, until two children return from the dead knowing exactly who she is.
More than 300 years later, Cruel Mother remains one of the creepiest ghost stories ever put to music.
