Gypsy Davy

It’s an old story, even if it’s a fantasy of the working classes: women are just naturally more attracted to tough, masculine adventurers than to effete noblemen. D.H. Lawrence mined the fantasy with his novels, most famously Lady Chatterly’s Lover. The concept, though, had been around much earlier, such as in this song about the attractive gypsy who sweeps a bored lady off her feet. The song is one of the most popular of the ballads from the British Isles. Hundreds of versions have been collected in the Americas. As with many of the old songs we write about, this one has been modified a lot as it’s traveled around, so recordings exist of several different versions. Personal preference being what it is, there’s almost always one version of a ballad that I like lots better than the rest. This song is an exception. I’ve never heard a boring variant of it. An excellent one is sung by the Carter Family, Black Jack David, In  Clinch Mountain Treasures. A different version, Gypsy Davy by Tip McKinney, was published as an LP by the Missouri Friends of Folk Arts, I’m Old, but I’m Awfully Tough (perhaps out of print?). I occasionally sing either of those, but more often, I revert to the version I learned first: Woody Guthrie’s, on a Library of Congress recording.  A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings. Woody’s dusty voice and sonorous guitar seem particularly well-suited to the simple words he uses. Woody’s egalitarian world-view was mainly about income redistribution to the lower classes, but it wasn’t out of character for him to revive this old fantasy about the virility of the outcastes