Rose of Allandale, The

AKASweet Rose of Allandale/Allendale
LyricsCharles Jeffreys (1807-65)Music Samuel Nelson (1800-62)Roud1218
Music Hall performersT.Harris, 1840
Folk performancesSource Singers
Edward Franklin, 1907,Bucks, England
Mrs Parrott, 1923, Beds, England
Bell Duncan, 1929-35, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Maud Ewell, 1941 Virginia, USA
Arthur Giles, 1959, Bucks, England
Miss Cook, 1960s/70s, Yorkshire, England
Charles Green, 1971, Yorkshire, England
Copper Family, 1976,Sussex, England
Fred Jordan, 1990, Shropshire, England
Modern Performances
Nic Jones, and many more: see Mainly Norfolk for selected English examples. Widely sung in Irish traditional music too!
The morn was fair, the skies were clear, 
No breath came o'er the sea,
When Mary left her highland cot
And wander'd forth with me
Tho' flowers deck'd the mountains side
And fragrance fill'd the vale
By far the sweetest flower there
Was the Rose of Allandale

Was the Rose of Allandale
The Rose of Allandale
By far the sweetest flower there
Was the Rose of Allandale

Where'er I wander east or west
Though fate began to lour
A solace still was she to me
In sorrow's lonely hour
When tempests lashed our gallant barque
And rent her shiv'ring sail
One maiden form withstood the storm
Twas the rose of Allandale

And when my fever'd lips were parch'd
On Afric's burning sands
She whisper'd hopes of happiness
And tales of distant land
My life had been a wilderness
Unblest by fortunes gale
Had fate not linked my lot to her
The Rose of Allandale

A song which emerged from the early 19th century stage repertoire, which would now widely be considered as “traditional”, a “folksong”.

The Music Halls, emerged from the early 18th-century millieu of tavern singing rooms, supper clubs etc, where then new popular songs and older songs would be sung for entertainment. The best record we have of this period are perhaps the diaries of Charles Rice, who records that The Rose of Allendale featured in the repertoire of a singer called Mr Tom Harris. The diaries don’t tell us much about Tom other than that he appears regularly singing in tavern singing rooms throughout 1840.

Modern versions are often derived from the version sung by the Copper family – which varies only slightly from the original version given above. The song was originally written by Charles Jeffreys (1807-65) and Samuel Nelson (1800-62) at some point in the very late 1820s or very early 1830s, appearing in published form around 1831/32:

Morning Post (London) Jan 14 1832

The song, according to the notice above, was performed as part of the opera Rob Roy, which seems to have first been staged in 1818. Early descriptions of the opera refer to several songs, but not to to the Rose of Allandale, so it’s possible that the song may have been newly written and added in 1830 or 1831. For Jeffreys to have written a song that appeared in an 1818 opera he would have had to write it at the age of 11, possible but perhaps unlikely.

Charles Jeffreys also wrote Jeannette’s Farewell to Jeannot and Mary of Argyll, two other songs which have proved popular with latter-day folk singers.

Sources

Nic Jones sings it:

Last Updated on October 26, 2020 by John Baxter | Published: March 11, 2020

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