The Yankey's return from camp. Together with the favorite song of the Black bird

Evidently the typesetter assumed that the song “Yankey’s Return from Camp” would sell better than “The Black Bird,” hence the discrepancy between the title and the placement of the lyrics on the broadside. This Yankey’s Return broadside and The Yankees Return from Camp must have been in the same or adjacent stacks in Coverly’s shop, as they are bound together in Thomas’s collection as leaves 81 and 82 in the first volume.

Curiously, the Jacobite song “Black Bird” has survived in tradition nearly intact as an Irish song of rebellion. There are no marks to make it Irish; the diction is very similar to other songs of English ladies pining over either the Old Pretender, who would have been James III, or, later in the century, his son, the young Pretender, Charles Edward. Because of their dark complexions, both were known as the “Blackbird,” as was James II, their father and grandfather who was deposed in 1689. The Irish Catholics certainly supported James in his attempt to take the throne from William and Mary in 1689-90 and many lost their lives in the effort. A broadside entitled The Black Bird; or, The Flower of England Flown was issued in London in about 1718 after James’s second abortive attempt to claim the throne and similar texts have been collected from more recent Irish singers (Zimmerman 119-21; Roud #2375; R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources). Thus, while the song may have originated in England, it fell on fertile ground among the Irish, to whom it spoke the same message that resonated with the highland Scots after the defeat of the young Pretender at Culloden in 1746.

The tune is a more difficult matter. Several tunes with the title “The Black Bird” were circulating about 1800. Betsy Gaylord wrote one out in her manuscript collection made in Connecticut between 1798 and 1817, a tune also in two other New England manuscript tunebooks. However, Fleischmann associates the text on this broadside with a tune printed in Cooke’s Selection (ca. 1795), which is also found in O Farrell’s Pocket Companion a few years later. Either of these is possible, although neither fits the broadside text closely.