"The Unfortunate Rake" is a ballad (Roud 2, Laws Q26),[1] which through the folk process has evolved into a large number of variants, including allegedly the country and western song "Streets of Laredo".
She failed to warn him when she "disordered" him, so he was unable to obtain the medication that would have saved him ("salts and the pills of white mercury", an obsolete treatment for syphilis).
He further instructs that they should "muffle their drums" but "play their pipes merrily", specifying the "dead march" as music, and asking for "guns" to be fired "right over my coffin".
[8] According to Bishop and Roud (2014), the earliest-known variant, a late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century broadside in the Madden Collection, is called "The Buck's Elegy".
[10] The moribund young man bewails the fact that he did not know what was wrong with him in time, in which case he could have taken mercury to treat the ailment, and he makes requests about his funeral.
Bishop and Roud state: "Despite the number and variety of collected versions, the early history of the song is still unclear, and surprisingly few nineteenth-century broadside copies have survived."
Some versions, they explain, provide clues to a sexually transmitted disease as the cause of the persona's woes; others "manage to avoid or disguise this element".
[13] The single verse is as follows: My jewel, my joy, don't trouble me with the drum, Play the dead march as my corpse goes along; And over my body throw handfuls of laurel, And let them all know that I'm going to my rest.
"[17] In the 2018 Katharine Briggs Memorial Lecture, Professor Richard Jenkins discusses several aspects of what he calls the "folkloristic narrative" relating to these songs.
He asserts that several aspects of this narrative may be shown to be "dubious, if not incorrect", and suggests that the way in which a "misleading tale" became accepted as "conventional knowledge" has implications for those engaged in the study of folklore.
[8] For example, the words provided for the air "The Unfortunate Rake" by Crosby are about a wandering harpist from Connaught, who is seeking pity and hospitality from his listeners.
In 1915, yet another tune was published in the Journal of the Folk Song Society; this time stated to be similar to one used for rush-cart Morris dancing at Moston, near Manchester, England.
[22] In 1918, English folk song collector Cecil Sharp, who was visiting the US, collected a version which used the phrase "St James' Hospital" in Dewey, Virginia.
[26] The version sung, and possibly devised, by Lloyd appears to be the earliest available variant using the title "The Unfortunate Rake" for which there is clear evidence.
These liner notes are the main origin of an often repeated incorrect idea that an early version of the song was collected in Dublin, Ireland.
A version of the song, renamed to "A Young Trooper Cut Down", was recorded on the 2016 Harp and a Monkey album War Stories.
In 2018 the song was prominently featured in "The Mortal Remains," the final episode of the Coen Brothers The Ballad of Buster Scruggs under the title "The Unfortunate Lad."