Barbara Allan

Anonymous 1740

“Barbara Allan” is a traditional ballad that originated in Scotland. The first written reference to it occurred in 1666 in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, where Pepys praises it after watching a stage performance sung by an actress. It appeared in a collection of popular songs compiled in 1740 by Allan Ramsay, the Tea-Table Miscellany, and then it was included in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry in 1765. But like most ballads, it probably existed in oral tradition long before Pepys’s reference or these eighteenth-century publications.

As are all traditional ballads, “Barbara Allan” is a narrative song, or a song that tells a story. Ballads tell their stories directly, with an emphasis on climactic incidents, by stripping away those details that are not essential to the plot. In this case, the ballad tells of a woman who rejects her lover because he has “slighted” her and hurt her feelings. As is typical, “Barbara Allan” does not give many details about the background incident, but merely refers to it as the event that triggers the action. Barbara’s lover dies of a broken heart from her rejection of him, and after his death, she realizes her mistake. That realization results in her own death, also of a broken heart. Their tragic love seems to live on, though, in the symbolic intertwining of the rose and brier that grow from their graves.