The Soldier and his fair maid, together with Hard times

The story of the seduced haymaker has many variants, and “The Soldier and His Fair Maid” is unusual in that the seducer is still around nine months later and he marries the girl. As the song progresses, it seems to be heading toward the conventional faithless-lover type when the soldier deserts the maiden. The verses in which he returns and accepts his responsibility to marry her are about as uncommon in such songs as such faithfulness seems to have been in real life. The sneering, concluding lines addressed to “country clowns” is also unusual in songs of this sort. Since the lover is a soldier, it may be from the pen of a recruiting songwriter—anything goes if it makes the life of the soldier seem more attractive.

This song of nine quatrains may have come to the typesetter orally. The early repetition of the word “yonder” with several meanings suggests a misunderstanding of the original words. Some of the rhymes seem forced. The title of “The Soldier and His Fair Maid” repeats that of the second text on America, Commerce, and Freedom, an alternate title for Ranordine, and the story shares elements with that song. However, this one is quite different in that the lover is actually a soldier and he marries the girl. We have found no concordances to this text. The abruptness of the soldier’s reappearance after verse 5 suggests that at least one verse is now missing.

The English text “Hard Times” has many versions that can be found in slip ballad sheets, broadsides, and songsters, and collected from traditional singers in Great Britain and America (Roud #876). They are all bitter satires on the willingness of every class to “bite” and cheat one another and those above and below, and how hard the times are because of it. Some have moralizing verses at the end, while some do not. “The Humorous Bits of the World” ends with

Let’s be just in our dealings, and practice no ill.
For honesty is the best policy still.

A nineteenth-century lyric, “Monopolizer, A New Song,” has different verses but the same theme, and ends

When times are at the worst let’s hope they will mend,
May each man in distress ne’er want a friend;
I hope all true Britons will live for to see
Better times in Old England, for worse cannot be.

A longer version of the broadside text was copied with a tune by Ishmael Spicer into his song collection begun in Connecticut in the late 1790s.