Silver Dagger (song)
| "Silver Dagger" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by Joan Baez | ||||
| from the album Joan Baez | ||||
| Language | English | |||
| Released | 1960 | |||
| Genre | Folk | |||
| Label | Vanguard | |||
| Composer(s) | Traditional | |||
| Joan Baez track listing | ||||
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"Silver Dagger", with variants such as "Katy Dear", "Molly Dear", "The Green Fields and Meadows", "Awake, Awake, Ye Drowsy Sleepers" and others (Laws M4 & G21, Roud 2260 & 2261), is an American folk ballad, whose origins lie possibly in Britain. These songs of different titles are closely related, and two strands in particular became popular in commercial Country music and Folk music recordings of the twentieth century: the "Silver Dagger" version popularised by Joan Baez, and the "Katy Dear" versions popularised by close harmony brother duets such as The Callahan Brothers, The Blue Sky Boys and The Louvin Brothers.
In "Silver Dagger", the female narrator turns away a potential suitor, as her mother has warned her to avoid the advances of men in an attempt to spare her daughter the heartbreak that she herself has endured. The 1960 recording by Joan Baez features only a fragment of the full ballad. "Katy Dear" uses the same melody but different lyrics, telling a similar story from a male perspective.
The song exists in a large number of variations under many different titles, and with lyrics that may show a mixture of different songs. Steve Roud observes on one version of the song titled "O! Molly Dear Go Ask Your Mother":
Of interest are early versions of two songs, "Silver Dagger" and "Drowsy Sleeper", whose lyrics have some relation to each other, but differ in lines, verse rhythm and outcome. The texts of these two songs may share a common origin in the older theme of night visit in traditional English songs. The plot of "Silver Dagger" is similar to that of "Drowsy Sleeper" whereby the parents object to a match between a boy and a girl, except that the silver dagger is used as a suicide weapon by the young lovers, while in "Drowsy Sleeper" the couple elope. However, at some point in the 19th century, there also appears to have been a fusion of these two different songs whereby the tragic ending of "Silver Dagger" becomes attached to "Drowsy Sleeper", giving rise to some later variations of the song.
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