The Unquiet Grave
(Child 78, Roud 51)
The unquiet grave recounts a tale of someone who mourns too long for their dead lover. The ballad has been collected many times in the oral tradition and the Roud Index contains 108 entries mainly from Southern England, the North Eastern USA and Canada.
The ballad contains two pieces of folk mythology;
that mourning for too long will prevent the spirit of the departed
from being at piece and a kiss from the shade of a dead lover hastens
your own death.
To me this ballad contains a reminder that life
carries on after a loved one has departed and that, while mourning is
part of saying farewell, in the end you must get on with your own
life and put what has formerly been behind you.
The version I sing here is more or less a version
I heard sung on a recording by Ian Campbell and is also very close to
the first version in Child. I accompanied myself on a shruti box.
There have been many recordings of this song. The
song seems to tap into something deep in our psyche. One I liked was
by Gryphon. They sang a different version to me using the tune "Dives & Lazarus".
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