• History of the Tune
  • 16th century
  • 17th century
  • 18th century
  • 19th century
  • 20th century
  • 21st century
• Listen in ABC or Midi
• Lyrics of Captain Kidd
• Lyrics of Similar Songs

1. REMEMBER O THOU MAN
The earliest printed score that resembles Captain Kidd in both tune and meter is A Christmas Carol of 1611 in Thomas Ravencroft's Melismata. However it's in three-four time:

*Ane Compendious Book of Godly and Spirituall Sangsi Collectit out of Sundry parts of the Scripture with sundry other Ballats changed out of prophaine sangis for avoiding of sin and harlatry, with augmentation of sundrye gude and godly Ballates, etc., etc. Printed by Andro Hart, Edinburgh, 1567. 

2. LIEF ME NOT
There is however an earlier printed lyric in the same meter: “All My Lufe, Leif Me Not, Leif Me Not” in a Scottish book of sacred songs of 1567 by the Wedderburn brothers' Gude and Godlie Ballates* But no score was printed therein.
Gilchrist and White agree that song to be a sacred parody of a secular folk song “My lufe is lyand sick, send him joy, send him joy” in the Complaynt of Scotland of 1549, of which song we have only the first line. And Gilchrist conjectured that the music for these songs could be the tune used later for “Germany Thomas.” For although that song's lyrics refer to a war of 1630-48 the tune could be older.

White writes “there is no Scottish song between the parody of 1567 and the printed song, “Germanie” in 1794. But it seems certain that some such song, widely known, had been in existence throughout the period …

Or play in MIDI: 42GerB

The Declaration and Standard of the Levellers of England; delivered in a speech to his Excellency the Lord Gen. Fairfax, on Friday last at White-Hall, by Mr. Everard ... (1649)
The Diggers allied with the Levellers.

“Also notes on the Jacobite songs in Hogg’s Jacobite Relics, and on “Germanie” in some Scottish Collections, speak of similar songs to the same tune being common in the Scottish Lowlands. We may say then that there existed a Scottish love lyric continuously from the middle of the sixteenth century; like many folk songs it was brought up to date from time to time. The earliest form, that in the Complaynt of Scotland, may have referred to Scots who had gone abroad to serve under Kings of France (see Forbes-Leith, Muster Roll of Scots Guard) then to Scots who fought in the Thirty Years War in Germany, and later in the French Wars of the eighteenth century.

3. THE DIGGERS SONG
E.A. White suggests "that the Scottish song or some song derived from it was picked up by English soldiers during the Civil Wars [1642-51] and so suggested the form, first of the Diggers' song
and then fifty years later of the ballads Jack Hall and Captain Kidd. This last was long remembered… I suggest that the “Diggers’ Song” is the known link—there may have been others—connecting the English songs with the Scottish prototype.”
However this is conjecture for unfortunately no music was ever printed for folk songs in the olden days hence no historical documents can be found to prove his proposal. In view of this the local authorities of Weybridge Surrey, the1649 site of the Diggers on St. George's Hill, voted that the Diggers' Song should be sung to a version of Captain Kidd.

by Leon Rosselson1979

However here is a different tune composed by Leon Rosselson

This tune reappeared in 1662 for "The Beggar laid him down to sleepe" and the satrical "Duke of Norfolk"

"I am the Duke of Norfolk with a Hey with a Hey,
I am the Duke of Norfolk with a Hoe....
I am the Duke of Norfolk with a Hey tronony nony floe.

At the beginning of the British civil war:
"Farwell to ye parlyament
with a Hey with a Hey,
far well to ye parliament with a Hoe,
your dear delight ye Cittye,
whose wants have made us witty
& a figg for ye close Comittee
with a Hey tronony nony Hoe.

Unfortunately the family tree of Sound a Charge shows no historical documents connecting the last three tunes with Captain Kidd of 1701.

6. DOCUMENTED DESCENT
There are however real documents connecting the following songs with Captain Kidd

In the days of metal type the printing of music scores was very rare. It needed special type that was dificult to set. Most of the examples that exist are of church music.

No score was printed for the tune Coming Down on the Captain Kidd broadsheets of 1701. In those times the vendor teaching you the tune was included in the broadsheet's price of tuppence. Until quite recently no one could identify the tune Coming Down because "Coming Down" was not in fact its title; nor were those its first words. The tune was the song sung for Jack's Hall's execution the year before, because the last line is "but never a word I said coming down". The song was a big hit in 1700.

The Moderators Dream
refers to the tune
Jack Hall as
Chimney Sweep.

29JhFi.mid

The score was printed in 1783 in The Vocal Enchantress

It is in Dorian Mode, that is like harmonic minor but the Seventh is sharp even in falling which gives it haunting quality. In chords that's a 7th Sharp diminished.

(18AbBo midi)

8. YE JACOBITES
In 1746 the words for a Scottish song about the Jacobite Rebellion had printed on them "to be sung to the tune of Captain Kidd". In 1792 Robert Burns rewrote this as Ye Jacobites by Name and published it. Listen to it here sung by Owen Hand

We are overjoyed that at last somebody printed a score, however this cannot be taken to be the true tune of Captain Kidd because it has a different purpose. It's mood is assertive.

Note the unmistakeable Scottish flourishes that elevate its mood in this stirring arrangement by Barry Taylor:

11. THE RELIGIOUS BRANCH

Remember Sinful youth, you must die, you must die

Joseph Hillman’s The Revivalist, Albany, NY. cop 1868, No. 429

The voice of wisdom hear, Be in time, be in time.

G.P. Jackson writes “Among the songs listed above one will have noticed that some fail to fit the precise Kidd formula in text rhythm. In such songs the departure from the norm will be found corrected usually by the tune. If not, it must be charged to the general principle of variation-within-unity, a rule familiar to students of folksong.” (page 244)
On the other hand David W. Music points out that in William Walker's Southern Harmony, "Captain Kidd or through all the World Below" and "Wondrous Love or Captain Kidd" are not the same tune although often used interchangably.
Let's listen to the two together.

It sounds very interesting, close harmony in A minor. But not perfect because in bars 3 and 14 where the first plays a C the second plays a B. This is because "Through all the World Below" is in Natural Minor whereas "Wondrous Love" is in Dorian mode.

56WbSo

12Wbcompared

12. THE TREASURIES

In 1940 Olin Downes and Elie Siegmeister published a collection of songs from the campfire songbooks of the old revivalist camps. A Treasury of American Song inevitably including a version of Captain Kidd. It is in G minor but, honest to the old songbooks, rather dull musically. Typical of American versions it repeates the last line, making five phrases out of four.

In 1952 The Fireside Book of Folk Songs containing exactly the same Kidd melody but arranged by Norman Lloyd in D minor and with a slight variation in the bass ornamentation.

SAM HALL
But the Kidd tune emerged in a very contrasting locale: the rowdy British Music Hall. In 1849 G.W. Ross adapted the 1700 song Jack Hall by changing it to Sam Hall and adding lyrics like "I'll see you all in Hell and I hope you fizzles well ... It's up the rope I go ... I hate you one an' all, blast your eyes". Ross dressed the part and "The refrain was hurled with furious venom at the audience and out of such abject squalor emerged a performance of high pathos". Unfortunately the composer is unknown, and once again no-one kept a written score, so all we have is differing memories of it.

Below are my transcripts of two American folk versions of Sam Hall as midi files, with the first verse sung live in audio. And you can hear the whole songs sung live in the original audio files from the Max Hunter song collection.

Sam Hall by Roy "Wrinkle" Winkler in 1969

Sam Hall by May Kennedy McCord in 1960

Just as a charicature can tell us more about the subject than a portrait, perhaps musical parodies of Captain Kidd can teach us some more about the tune?

WITH HUMOR
In 1901 Kidd inspired in Will Marion Cook a cheerful contrast. Hurrah for Captain Kidd was a big hit in three shows, the most famous being the first ever all-black Broadway production, In Dahomey, in which it was performed by Bert Williams and George Walker the famous Cake-Walk Kings. "As always, the job of the tune is to enhance the basic sentiment, comedic spirit, general attitude, or moralizing conclusion of a text" (Riis) so his intention being humorous Cook composed syncopated 6/8 verses and a 2/4 time chorus. He echoes the historic Captain Kidd song only by exagerating its excessive repetition: having eight words rhyming with Kidd in the chorus:

The Music and Scripts of In Dahomey, ed T.L.Riis ©1996 American Musicological Society <http://www.sas.upenn
.edu/music/ams/>

15KHur

WITH CYNICISM
The 1940s saw the beginning of the opinion that perhaps Kidd had never really been a pirate. No doubt arguments enlivened many a cocktail party. This attitude stimulated the witty Benéts to parody it in a song: "you'll read in all the newer history books that he was mild...They say he never pirated - I think perhaps he did", These words and "I think perhaps they're wrong" are marked to be sung "with cynicism".

Captain Kidd in Sing a Song of Americans by Rosemary and Stephen Benét with music by Arnold Shaw
©1941 Musette Publishers, Steinway Hall, New York.

16KCyn

Shaw's modern response to the folk song, a jazzy parody, is most intelligent and educational.

Ella Mae Morse in 1945

... He never got nowhere being a hep corsair,
But here's a clue to how he met his Waterloo:
One day he went and found the honey,
She took the boy for all his money,
Soon after that he flipped his lid,
And finished up the tale of Captain Kidd.

Wonderful, but this tune does not resemble our historical tune at all.

Captain Kid  
2:54
1945
Ella Mae Morse
Solo artist with Capitol Records

13. THE FIFTIES
I collected the tune below from my father

but it is unlike any other melody I have found so I conclude it's the bass part of a choral arrangement.

The Lyrics of Captain Kidd have many different
versions; click here

FOLK SONG

16. AMERICAN SAILORMEN
In the nineteen-twenties Joanna Colcord noted down the tune as commonly sung by american sailors. It emphasizes a common feature of the song: slides at the beginnings of lines and stays at the ends. It is in natural minor i.e., G minor but with a consistently sharp seventh.

It uses the repetition of the last line characteristic of American versions.

14KJcP midi

However many folk singers follow Pete Seeger, who popularized the following attractive version that he learned in England from Steve Benbow. But I must say Steve Benbow was obviously influenced by his own second name for it is really the tune of Admiral Benbow "Come all ye sailors Bold".

Pete Seeger played in E on a long-necked 5-string banjo.

A wide range of performance styles persist: all the way through happy merrymakers who laugh about Kidds execution - to those who feel for him and lament his fate.

3. Traditional performers of historic music who sing it as a true lament. An admirable example of this is Carl Peterson, a native of Greenock, who sings it acapella on his 2003 album I Love Scottish and Irish Sea Songs, on his own label

4. Progressive musicians like the Cowboy Junkies who compose variations. Unfortunately they only issued their Captain Kidd on promo singles: RCA records 1990PT 49288 or 1991 2612-2-RDJ. Here's a new verse about his loss of friends.

19. RELIEF FROM THE DIRGE
Listening to a long version of the Captain Kidd song one finds that the constant repetition of “and I sailed” is hypnotic like a dirge, but after a while it becomes annoying, and one starts to yearn for something different. For this function popular music composers write a bridge; that is a passage in a different key whose function is to reflect, contrast and refresh before returning to the original verse theme. A 32-bar song structure is AABA where B is the bridge or 'middle eight'. The conventional bridge is a perfect fourth higher, but in modern music I have found it can start out on almost anything, for example I, iii, V or vi.

WHERE'S THAT CONFOUNDED BRIDGE?
Exhausted by listening to this tune a thousand times, in August 2006 I took the tune in A and wrote a bridge for it that goes like this 99KiddBridge1.mid. “Are there a thousand pounds of treasure buried in the sand on some tropic island shore? Hidden lost and waiting for some lucky hand - or could there be ten thousand dollars more?”

Also in 2006 the folk-rock group Tempest must have felt the same, for they recorded their Captain Kidd tune in B minor with a bridge that goes like this: IV, iii, I, ii. And I must admit theirs is better than mine.

PROSECUTION AND DEFENSE
Using the historical lyrics my bridge explains the greedy financial motivation behind the case for Kidd’s prosecution. Tempest, by contrast rewrote the lyrics as a case for Kidd’s defense and their bridge sums up their case. I chose to make the air of my bridge cheerful and whimsical as a contrast to the verses for relief from the dirge, in the genre of the Robert Kidd folk story that focuses on the hidden treasure. Tempest however sum up the message of their verses, which is what a bridge is supposed to do. Their bridge is also repeated to make it more memorable, emphasizing the ‘double-crossed’ message. They even used ‘The Double Cross’ as their album title.

99KiddBridge

KiddTempestBridgeOnly

<http://profs.sci.univr.
it/~dafx/DAFx- final-papers.html>
pages 131-134

<mikael.fernstrom@ul.ie> <donncha.omaidin@ul.ie>

20. SETTLING THE SCORE
On this page you've heard about 50 different tunes for Captain Kidd, and on my page Songs Like Captain Kidd you can hear another 35 that resemble them. To compare this many tunes is unmanagable. Two Computer Scientists at the University of Limerick have developed a way to arrange a music database for comparison. Donncha O'Maidin and Mikael Fernström write that melodic distance can be defined by a geometric algorithm:

If you really want to hear all 85 tunes that sound like Captain Kidd at the same time click here !

"As the algorithmic comparison of melodies is computationally quite demanding, it might be interesting to separate applications like this into a client-server model with a light-weight client implemented for example in Java. The server would have to create the auditory spatialization in real-time for each client, a goal that appears to be achievable with todays computer power and networking. This would open up the possibility to use applications like this via the Internet"says Fernström and O'Maidin.
To read their paper in full go to <http://profs.sci.univr.it/~dafx/DAFx-final-papers.html>; select pages131-134 and download the pdf.
My version of their idea would be to have Captain Kidd at the center and all others mapped around, leaning towards Admiral Benbow in one corner, Sam Hall in another, Mentra Gwen in a third corner and Germanie Thomas in the fourth.

21. COMPARISON BY SYNTHESIS
1. We have to standardise so we can compare. We need to convert all tunes to the same pitch so we can play them together. But what root note shall we chose? Based on all the 85 similar tunes collected, G is the most popular (see graph below left); whereas for tunes actually called "CaptainKidd" (below right) A takes the lead. So based on historical statistics we choose A.

48GwFt

56GerM

2. Next we must separate the major and minor songs for they are too discordant so can’t be compared directly. I have also come to find the major key to be inappropriate for the mood of this dirge. Listen to 99KCMj and you can see that despite the discords they are still too cheerful.

3. The tunes in minor keys I find much better suited to the lyrics. We must separate these into two different modes for they clash on the G natural note versus G sharp issue. So half the versions are in dorian mode, that is natural minor, and the others are in harmonic minor.
Listen to 99KCMnDor
and to 99KCMnHar There are still some discords but from the concords you can get the hang of what the real tune should be.

4. I found some tunes to be identical, for example that from Joanna Colcord's Roll and Go when put in the same key is exactly the same tune as that from William Bonners' Pirate Laureate except for the long slurs. Hence the length of the extension of the note at the end of some passages is a matter of performance. In all versions there is always an extension of the note in bar 7, but whether it is written as a pause or as an extra bar is variable. British transcribers prefer the pause whereas Americans prefer the extra bar.

5. I found that American versions like to repeat the fourth line making an 18 bar verse whereas the British versions sing the fourth line just once followed by a one-bar “as I sailed” making them 15 bars long.

99KCMj

99KCMnDor

99KCMnHar

SITES CITED
American Musicological Society <http://www.sas.upenn.edu/music/ams/>
Bruce Olson <http://www.mudcat.org/olson/viewpage.cfm/>
CCEL <www.ccel.org/s/southern_harmony/>
Contemplator, Lesley Nelson-Burns <www.contemplator.com/>
COST G6 Conference <http://profs.sci.univr.it/~dafx/DAFx-final-papers.html>
Digital Tradition Mirror, Rick Heit <www.sniff.numachi.com/~rickheit/dtrad/>
Electric Scotland <http://www.electricscotland.com/History history/other/inglis_james.htm>
Max Hunter Song Collection <http://www.missouristate.edu/folksong/MaxHunter/>
The Jolly Rogers <www.chivalry.com/jollyrogers/>
The Mudcat Café <www.mudcat.org/threads.cfm>

24. RESPONSES FROM OUR READERS
Please send your comments to
davidkidd@spiritone.com

INDEX

KIDD MUSIC

KIDD LYRICS

SONGS LIKE

SOURCES IN ABC