The Cowdenknowes is a hillside close to Galashiels in the Scottish Borders, a south facing slope of the Tweed Valley. It is still covered with yellow broom from Spring to late Summer, though recently common gorse has invaded as well. Broom has been replanted in many nearby fields and roadsides to encourage repopulation of the hills with this attractive plant. Broom is synonymous with outdoor courting and premarital or extramarital sex in Scottish song language (to `go to the broom' was to have sex, until maybe 60 years ago).
The period of its flowering was identical to the main part of the year for outdoor agricultural work, which was shared between men and women who were often semi-itinerant, hired by the season. Men and women slept separately in communal rooms or byres (barns) but mixed relatively freely, and in Scotland courtship is very egalitarian _ women have traditionally had considerable freedom. Scottish history and folk traditions were thoroughly bowdlerised by the Victorians, who found it difficult to live in union with a country where the official clergy had advocated free love two hundred years before the French revolution and where trial marriages of a year's duration could be undertaken and undone with nothing more than a public declaration.
The key to the song is the `tod hae frichted me' line. Local lore has it that if a girl's path is crossed by dog-fox at night, she will become pregnant. So telling her father that the shepherd built the sheepfold too far away from the house, on the far side of the hill, and she was frightened by a fox as a result is just the same as telling him she has become pregnant through a liaison when out with the flock.
A fuller version of the song has her failing to recognise the young man responsible, because he rides past dressed in uniform and she had thought he was just another shepherd. The outcome is the same, and he reveals himself as a landowner, and marries her. It is most likely that more burlesque or bawdy versions of the words have been current in the past.
The tune of The Broom o' the Cowdenknowes can be found in most Scottish songbooks and it works particularly well if played with a legato, broken chord guitar accompaniment (2/4 time) and a violin, tin whistle or flute chasing the vocal. It is greatly improved by a running bass on the downbeat, which can `walk up' at the end of the second line. The first verse can be used as a chorus, though the version given here just uses the beginning of the first line as a reprise instead. I find that the tune I use, which rises from the tonic on the first line, is different from that played by local fiddlers who use a counterpoint variant which uses wider intervals (more uppy-and-downy) and is thus much better as a dance tune, but pretty awful for singing.
I took the Scots words used here from "Lyric Gems of Scotland", edition around 1900. Many local singers use an entirely different set of modern words, in the inappropriate manner of a love song, and are totally unfamiliar with any of the older sets of words. I think the 20thC words just make the whole song pointless.
"Berry-brown steed" and "thirty ploughs and three" are standard ballad mnemonics used to fill out metre and create easy rhymes. You can find them in all forms of English language folk song. Example, from Willy O'Winsbury:
"Cast down, cast down your berry-brown gown"
"The king has called his merry-men O by thirty and by three"
The same applies to `It fell on a day, a het simmer day' which is identical in words, rhythm and almost in melody to the opening bars of The Bonny House of Airlie.
Throughout the folksong of Britain you will find common phrases or structures appearing in this way. They provide a convenient waystation for singers as they remember ballad-form songs (stories) which do not have taradiddles (last lines which are nonsense - with a dirrum a dree an'a dree an'a drum, with a dirrum a dree drum dray etc) or repeated choruses. The same broadly applies to the repartee of last lines in following first lines, which can produce some of the most haunting effects, and the repetition as a reponse of complete couplets. They give you time recall the structure of the rest of the song.
If you want to study popular song and folk lyrics and structures from the last 300 years, the best recommended reading with tunes and variants is the Grieg-Duncan Collection of Folk Song, Mercat Press, Edinburgh. There are seven volumes so far, and an eighth due, and the cost of the set is in the order of $500 plus shipping (it takes up half a standard bookcase shelf).
Details from James Thin, 53-59 South Bridge, Edinburgh, telephone (+44) 131 556 6743.
These notes are copyright David Kilpatrick, Maxwell Place, Kelso TD5 7BB, Scotland. You may repeat them if you wish, but please credit their source. Anyone using any of this material for study purposes deserves whatever problems they run into, because I have no qualifications whatsoever and anything you read here is my own interpretation based on personal reading and experience.