Tis but a little golden ring

From Frank Kidson Collection

Memory carries my fancy today
Back to a scene that has long passed away;
There stands a sailor in garments of blue,
Bidding a worn weeping widow adieu.
Vows for the future he laughingly makes
While from her finger a keeper she takes;
In accents so tender; heart-broken with tears,
These are the words whispered into his ears - 
            
It is but a little golden ring ,
I give it you with pride;
Wear it for mother's sake,
And when you're on the tide,
If you are in trouble,John,
Comfort it will bring,
To think of me while gazing on
That little golden ring.

One more "God bless you" twixt mother and me.
Good-bye forever, perhaps it might be.
Boldly I turned and manfully strode,
Till hidden from sight by a turn in the road.
Soon on the vessel the anchor was weighed,
Then for a strange destination we made,
While bright as a beacon my keeper would gleam,
The voice of my mother would say in my dream:

Time brought promotion and honour to me.
Duty was done as a duty should be,
Every mail brought a letter from home,
Oftentimes opened with grief I must own.
Slowly but surely my letters decreas'd,
Then on a sudden they silently ceased -
And ofttimes at midnight as I watched o'er the sea,
The voice of remembrance still whispered to me.

Once more old England's white cliffs are at hand,
Once more I stand on my own native land;
Strangers,they answered my knock when I call,
For mother is sleeping the last sleep of all.
Gold cannot tempt me, or jewels divine
To part for one hour with that keeper of mine;
A link of the past it for ever shall be,
To bring back the message she whispered to me.

This sentimental ballad was performed in the Halls and printed on several late 19th-century broadsides.

In traditional singing it is often associated with the singing of sailors – it features in William Main Doerflinger’s Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman as a “deep-water song” “sung mainly for entertainment”. Interestingly Jack London recalled singing the song in his autobiographical novel Jack Barleycorn:

I remember the runaway apprentices–boys of eighteen and twenty, of middle class English families, who had jumped their ships and apprenticeships in various ports of the world and drifted into the forecastles of the sealing schooners. They were healthy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed, and they were young–youths like me, learning the way of their feet in the world of men. …. I remember a melting song they sang, the refrain of which was:

“Tis but a little golden ring,
I give it to thee with pride,
Wear it for your mother’s sake
When you are on the tide.”

They wept over it as they sang it, the graceless young scamps who had all broken their mothers’ prides, and I sang with them, and wept with them, and luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of it, and struggled to make glimmering inebriated generalisations on life and romance.

Jack London (1913) John Barleycorn

In 1953 a fragment of the song was collected from singing of Welsh miner Thomas Thomas by Alan Lomax, a recording is available in the Lomax digital archive – Thomas associated the song with buying songs from an old ballad peddler.