Here is a thing I love about this song that almost nobody says out loud at the pub: the lad in The Black Velvet Band did NOTHING. Or near enough nothing. He is, in the most literal sense, an innocent man. And yet by the last verse he's halfway to the other side of the planet in chains. That's the whole song. A nice young fella ruins his life by being a bit soft for a pretty girl, and the law does the rest.
Let me walk you through it, because half the people who can belt out the chorus at full volume have never actually followed the plot. (No shame in that. I sang it for years before the penny dropped.)
Our narrator is an apprentice. Working away at a trade, minding his own business, "her eyes they shone like diamonds, you'd think she was queen of the land" — that's how he describes her, this stranger he meets. A young woman walking the street. And her hair, of course, is tied up with a black velvet band. The detail that names the whole song. He's smitten. Anybody would be, the way he tells it.
Now here's where it goes sideways. They're walking together, and she lifts a watch — pickpockets a gentleman, a watch right out of his pocket — and then she slips it into OUR fella's hand. Plants it on him. Quick as anything. And before he can even understand what's happened, the gentleman's roaring for the police, and the watch is found on the apprentice, and that's that. He never stood a chance. She set him up clean and walked away, the black velvet band and all.
He's hauled before the court. Seven years' transportation. Off to Van Diemen's Land — that's Tasmania, lads, that's the bottom of Australia — for a crime he didn't commit, on the word of a girl whose name he never even got.
And here's the part that gets me every single time. The last verse. He's not even angry. He's WARNING us. "So come all you jolly young fellows, a warning take by me" — he's standing there, ruined, and his final thought is to tell the next young man to be careful who he walks home with. That's not a villain's song. That's a heartbroken one. He got played and he KNOWS he got played and the only thing he has left is the telling of it.
Now. The history, which is murkier than people pretend.
This is a transportation ballad, and that's a whole tradition unto itself. Between roughly the 1780s and the 1860s, Britain shipped tens of thousands of convicts — Irish and English both — off to the penal colonies in Australia. Some for serious crimes. Loads for petty ones. A stolen loaf, a poached rabbit, a debt. And out of all that misery came a wave of songs, ballads sung by people who'd lost a brother or a son or a sweetheart to a ship they'd never see again. The Black Velvet Band sits right in the middle of that. So does The Wild Colonial Boy, which is the same world from the other angle — a transported lad who turns bushranger and goes out fighting instead of weeping. If you've not read that one I did a piece on it: The Wild Colonial Boy. They're cousins, those two songs. Same ships, same shore, very different men.
As for who WROTE The Black Velvet Band — nobody, and everybody. The honest answer is we don't know. It's the usual folk situation where you'll see versions printed on broadside ballad sheets in the 1800s, the cheap single-page song sheets they'd sell for a penny, and the city changes depending on where it was printed. Sometimes our lad's in Belfast. Sometimes London. Sometimes the watch is a watch, sometimes it's a different bit of stolen goods entirely. I've heard it set in Tralee and I've heard it set nowhere at all. That's not a flaw. That's how these songs LIVED — every singer made it a bit theirs.
The Dubliners and The Clancy Brothers are the reason most of us know it now, those big 1960s recordings that put it in every pub from here to Boston. But the song is far older than the men who made it famous. It was already old when they got to it.
What I keep coming back to is how plain the moral is and how little it helps. "Be careful." That's it. That's the lesson. As if anyone, smitten, eyes like diamonds, could possibly have been careful. The song knows that too, I think. That's why it's sad and not preachy. Nobody in it is wise. They just survived to sing.
If you want the words to follow along properly, have a look at our songbook — it's filling up nicely with the old standards now, and half of them share a shelf with the Bog in any decent session.
One last thought. People ask me sometimes why I keep a whole shrine for a daft cumulative song about a flea in a bog while ALSO going on about ballads of transportation and ruin. And the answer is they're the same impulse, really. Somebody, a long time ago, needed to remember a thing — a place, a face, a name, a man on a ship — and the only way to make it last was to make it singable. The Bog remembers its tree and its branch. The Black Velvet Band remembers a boy who trusted the wrong smile. Both of them got carried, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, all the way down to us. That's the magic. That's the whole job.
Go gently. And mind who's holding your hand on the walk home.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat has taken to sitting on the windowsill watching the road like she's expecting somebody. I told her nobody's coming. She did not believe me. She rarely does.