Granny Wales, and the Mulberry tree

Aloys Fleischmann clarifies the meaning of the title, Granny Wales, in his Sources of Irish Traditional Music:

Granuaile or Gráinne Umhail [was a] member of the O’Malley clan, chieftains of what is now the Barony of Murrisk, Co. Mayo. She married two Irish chieftains successively and maintained a large fleet of ships. Her feats became the subject of numerous legends. [She] died c. 1600. (#3194)

These legends were still very much alive, even in America. In a scrapbook of patriotic poetry made in 1814 the transcriber of a newspaper song on the sea battle between HMS Peacock and USS Hornet cited the tune as “old Grannu Weal” and added that she was “an Irish Queen well known to every patriotic Irishman” (Tracy). Her name became symbolic for Ireland and appears in many spellings and in many songs.

In this text, the spirit of Ireland is used as a symbol of the struggle for independence in which the American colonies were engaged. It purports to have been written shortly after the Battle of Lexington, which occurred on April 19, 1775 (see verse 7), but the issue in the author’s mind is still the tax on tea. The narrative is contradictory. Granny meets Lords Granville [Grenville] and Bute first on a Dublin street, and then she rides—by horse—to London and meets them again on the street. Grenville became prime minister in 1763. He proposed the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act, but left office in 1765 and died in 1770. Bute became first lord of the treasury in 1762, voted against the Stamp Act, and resigned in 1765. He withdrew from public life in 1766. Thus, neither man could have told Granny that they would “cool your sons courage, and make them to yield” in the war for independence.

All three editions of this song on Thomas’s broadsides (Granny Wales, and the Mulberry-Tree and The Fiery Devil, Together with Granny Wales) are the same, suggesting a stable lyric current in the early 1800s. However, an earlier, longer, and somewhat more coherent version of the text was issued in Boston in 1793. Here the byline under the title states that it is “an excellent patriotic Irish Song; never before printed in America.” In this text, “Granye” first meets Lord Conway, a member of Parliament and outspoken opponent of the war, in Dublin and then Lords North, Grenville, and Bute in London, a somewhat more reasonable scenario albeit still chronologically untidy. The Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775) replaces Lexington in this version, but no later events are mentioned. The Thomas text is closely related to this earlier text, although it has been rewritten and shortened. Interestingly, the version in the Green Mountain Songster (1823) reflects both versions.[1]

The earliest version of a tune for this song is in Henry Brooks’s Songs in Jack the Gyant Queller, a ballad opera from 1749, there called “Grania Meuel” (12). It clearly was a tune circulating in oral tradition, as the names differ in spelling dramatically: “Grania Mucil” in another ballad opera, Little John (1778); “Granuweal” in Henry Beck’s American tune collection from 1786; “Gráinne Mhaol” in the Dublin Monthly Magazine of May 1842 (Zimmerman 183). Most versions lean to a title that is closer to the broadside’s “Granny Wale” or “Weal,” perhaps an English spelling of “Granuaile.” While the details of the tune may differ from source to source, the melodic contour is fairly stable.

John Collins (1742-1808) wrote “The Mulberry Tree,” a philosophical text published in Scripscrapologia (1804). The American broadside version dropped Collins’s verse 6 beginning “But under the shade of the cypress or yew,” in which the reference is to being buried in the churchyard.

Shakespeare is credited with planting a mulberry tree in his home garden in Stratford upon Avon. It was cut down later by an angry resident, tired of tourists coming to see it. A box made from wood of the tree was presented to Garrick during the celebration of the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, and another song called “The Mulberry Tree” beginning “Behold this fair goblet” was performed and printed in sheet music and songbooks. Collins’s lyric does not appear to be related to this phenomenon except perhaps as a faddish topic, but rather may have grown from an older ballad with the burden line, “the dew that flies over the mulberry-tree.” Another song with this same burden appears in the stage farce Chrononhotonthologos (1734) by Henry Carey (d. 1743), sung by Cupid:

Are you a Widow, or are you a Wife?
Gilly Flow’r, gentle Rosemary.
Or are you a Maiden, so fair and so bright?
As the Dew that flies over the Mulberry-Tree.

Both texts were known to Americans from the 1770s on, copied into manuscript tune books and printed in songsters (R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources). The text appeared in ten songsters between 1797 and 1807 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).