Joan Baez - Silver Dagger [HD]+

Joan Baez sings the traditional song 'Silver Dagger' from her 1960 debut Vanguard album 'Joan Baez'. The lyrics are below with comments about the song.

Note: This video is a redo of an earlier one for this song.

[Vinyl/8-Images/WAV]

Silver Dagger (Singer: Joan Baez)

Don't sing love songs; you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here, right by my side
And in her right hand, a silver dagger
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies
The very next evening, they'll court another
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden
And hope that she will be your wife
For I've been warned and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

Songwriter: Traditional, Arranged by Joan C. Baez
[Lyrics from Wikipedia]

The album liner notes call this song "A remarkably compressed love story of the Southern Appalachians. In its four short verses loom enough tragic characters to populate an 18th century novel." The brief song incorporates many folksong elements: the suitor's night visit to his love, a knife that's sometimes a suicide weapon, the wife wronged by her husband (five miles of broken hearts!), parents' objections to the match of young lovers, and a tragic ending.

Wikipedia states:

"Silver Dagger", with variants such as "Katy Dear", "Molly Dear", "The Green Fields and Meadows", "Awake, Awake, Ye Drowsy Sleepers" and others (Laws M4 & G21, Roud 2260 & 2261), is an American folk ballad, whose origins lie possibly in Britain. These songs of different titles are closely related, and two strands in particular became popular in commercial Country music and Folk music recordings of the twentieth century: the "Silver Dagger" version popularized by Joan Baez, and the "Katy Dear" versions popularized by close harmony brother duets such as The Callahan Brothers, The Blue Sky Boys and The Louvin Brothers.

In "Silver Dagger", the female narrator turns away a potential suitor, as her mother has warned her to avoid the advances of men in an attempt to spare her daughter the heartbreak that she herself has endured. The 1960 recording by Joan Baez features only a fragment of the full ballad. "Katy Dear" uses the same melody but different lyrics, telling a similar story from a male perspective.

The song exists in a large number of variations under many different titles, and with lyrics that may show a mixture of different songs. Steve Roud observes on one version of the song titled "O! Molly Dear Go Ask Your Mother":

"A whole book could be written on this song and its connections with other songs which involve young men at their sweethearts' windows at night, disapproving parents and silver daggers. Hugely popular with North American traditional singers, 'Drowsy Sleeper' was also collected regularly in Britain and appeared on broadsides there from at least the 1820s."