Gentle Fair Jenny

The new film is based on a "Southern" folk ballad. Much preliminary research was done to clarify the history and meaning of the song. The song is about a wife who refuses to do house chores and is consequently punished by her husband. It was originally transcribed by J.F. Child in his famous collection of English and Scottish folk songs. It is hard to know quite how old this one is. In his collection alone he included many variants. The song is sung to many tunes that are in fact not related to each other. The words are of more importance. The original title assigned to the tune was The Wife Wrapped in Wether's Skin. The oldest, English and Scottish versions of the song connote that the wife does not want to cook for her husband because she is of high birth and finds it beneath her class to do so. In fact ‘gentle’ and ‘fair’ are words that tell us of her class. Her husband skins a sheep, and wraps his wife with the sheep's skin (wether's skin), and proceeds to beat her, although she is not hurt because she is thickly wrapped in the skin. She threatens to tell his 'kin on him, but he claims he has done nothing wrong, only tanned some skin (part of the process of making leather). You see, because of her high and fair class, it would be vulgar and brutal to outright beat her, so the man's clever solution for disciplining her is to wrap her in a skin first. Well it worked, and she never dared not to make dinner again. Of course this is a stretch in logic, but it is an intriguing piece.

As the song made its way to America, its variants multiplied, and in its new environment the song lost its class-connotations, the wether's skin, and simply became a song about a disobedient wife. Usually in the American variants she is beaten directly with a hickory branch. The refrains found throughout the song vary in all of the versions. "Gentle fair Jenny, fair Rosie Marie" and "As the dew[dove] flew over the mulberry tree[or green valley]" are found in some versions while nonsense words "dandoo, dandoo" and "klishima klashima klingo" are found in others. There is no definitive version, and in fact even the "gentle fair Jenny" version is unclear. Some singers say "Jennifer gentle", “Jennifore Jenny” or "Rosemary", and in fact the whole refrain may have come from an entirely different Child ballad [no. 1] in which "Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary" are the names of three sisters [they are also plant names].

Rather than bringing back the class element to the song, my version distinguishes Jenny from her husband in a different way. Here the clash is between old and modern, patriarchal and feministic, instead of poor and rich. The recording of the song used for the film is by Jean Ritchie for Smithsonian Folkways.

Enjoy!