The Prickle Holly Bush is a grim traditional folk song about a condemned man facing execution, complete with a gallows, a faithless family and one particularly unpleasant holly bush
Traditional British folk songs have an impressive number of ways to kill somebody, and The Prickle Holly Bush takes us straight to the gallows.
Also known as The Prickly Bush, The Maid Freed from the Gallows and Hangman, the song tells of a prisoner condemned to hang who desperately hopes somebody will arrive with the money needed to save his life.
The song is extremely old, although nobody knows exactly when it first appeared in Britain. Francis James Child included versions as Child Ballad No. 95, The Maid Freed from the Gallows, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads during the 19th century.
It is also catalogued as Roud Folk Song Index No. 144, with numerous versions collected across Britain, Ireland and North America.
The British versions often feature the memorable prickly bush refrain:
O the prickly bush, the prickly bush,
It pricked my heart full sore;
If ever I get out of the prickly bush,
I’ll never get in any more.
The “prickly bush” is essentially the terrible situation in which the condemned prisoner finds himself, although the cheerful-sounding refrain makes the approaching execution seem even stranger.
The basic story is wonderfully simple.
A prisoner waits beneath the gallows and watches for members of the family to arrive. Each time somebody approaches, there is fresh hope that they have brought the gold or money required to secure a pardon.
First comes one relative, then another.
The condemned person asks whether they have brought the money and, more importantly, whether they have come to save them from hanging.
The answer is usually no.
Depending on the version, parents, brothers and sisters all appear without providing what is needed. Eventually a sweetheart or lover arrives carrying the ransom and saves the prisoner from the rope.
That makes The Prickle Holly Bush unusually cheerful by traditional ballad standards, although some versions are considerably darker than others.
The song belongs to a much wider family of European folk tales and ballads involving somebody awaiting execution while relatives are tested to see who truly loves them. Versions have been found in several languages, suggesting the basic story may be considerably older than its surviving British forms.
The song crossed the Atlantic and developed a particularly strong life in American folk music, where the condemned character could be male or female and the details changed considerably.
One of the most famous descendants is Lead Belly’s The Gallis Pole, recorded during the 1930s and 1940s. In his version, the attempts to buy freedom take a much nastier turn, and the promised rescue does not necessarily work as expected.
Decades later, Led Zeppelin transformed the same old ballad into Gallows Pole for Led Zeppelin III in 1970, introducing its execution-day story to millions of rock listeners.
British folk singers also kept The Prickly Bush alive, including A.L. Lloyd and other performers associated with the 20th-century folk revival. Like many traditional songs, no single version can really be called definitive because singers continually changed the words, characters and ending.
That flexibility is part of what has kept the song alive.
Strip away the different titles and melodies, and the central image remains wonderfully bleak: somebody stands beneath a gallows, the hangman is waiting, and figures appear in the distance one by one.
The only question that matters is whether any of them has come to stop the execution.
For a song that eventually gave rock music Gallows Pole, The Prickle Holly Bush has remarkably deep and twisted roots.
