Female drummer: and The blue bell of Scotland

The girl in “Female Drummer” represents a large number of “female warriors” who follow their lovers or husbands to war or to sea—wherever they are taken (Dugaw 1996). It is not clear what period this song describes. The reference to “our noble queen” suggests an action during Queen Anne’s reign of 1702-14, when British troops under the duke of Marlborough fought many battles in Europe. But Ernest Augustus, brother of George I, was not duke of York until 1716, after Queen Anne’s death. The version of the song collected by John Clare in southern England in the 1820s also includes the line about the Queen’s bounty, but identifies the campaign as the siege of Valenciennes, which was conducted in part by another duke of York in 1793 (Deacon 260).

This “Female Drummer” text has many titles and survived strongly in oral tradition; it appeared in one songster in 1810 (Roud #226; R. Keller, Early American Songsters).[1] It also appears in the Thomas collection on Song, Written on a Virginia Cotton and Tobacco Merchant. Roy Palmer commented on the text as a reflection of reality.

While we are not prepared to accept our popular ballads as faithful narratives, we feel pretty sure that even the extravagant ones must have been suggested by actual situations and incidents, observed or recorded; and when we have so many ballads of “The Soldier Maid” kind, it is but reasonable to infer that long ago it was not uncommon for women to masquerade in male attire. It is further remarkable that they should so often be represented as challenging dangerous situations by land and sea, as soldiers and sailors. In such cases love is usually given as the compelling motive; but here we have a girl who joins the army for pure love of adventure. (qtd. in Shuldham-Shaw, Lyle, and Hunter 1:544)

Written by Dorothea Bland Jordan (1762-1816), an English actress, singer, and composer, the sentimental “Blue Bell of Scotland” has become a classic “Scottish folk song,” evoking as it does the Highland laddie, the bagpipes, and the plaid (Wolfe, Secular Music 455). Samuel Arnold introduced it into his pantomime Fairies’ Revels; or, Love in the Highlands (1802), the text was published on engraved sheet music, and it was quickly taken up by broadside ballad and songster compilers (Roud #13849). Thirty-five American sheet music and music collection editions of this text and/or tune appeared between 1801 and 1825, and the text appeared in nineteen songsters between 1802 and 1815 (Wolfe, Secular Music #4670-95; R. Keller, Early American Songsters).

The question-and-answer form gives a dramatic quality to the lyric. The inquirer asks the young girl about her lover, who has gone with British forces to fight against the French. This song joins “Banks of the Dee” (see A New Irish Song), “Roseline Castle” (see The Bonny Blade), and “There’s No Luck About the House” as a very popular late eighteenth-century sentimental song of women whose lovers have gone off with the army.