(Confusion aid: This is not about the recent movie by the same title.) “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a modern Irish song that’s so popular in Scotland most people think it’s a Scottish song. It’s song about plucking flowers from the blooming heather. That’s pretty Scottish, even in Iowa. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I fear for your education. I mean, it’s not like this is a Finnish song.
According to Irish Music Daily, “Wild Mountain Thyme” or “Will You Go, Lassie, Go” was written by William McPeake of Belfast’s McPeake family, who have apparently sustained traditional folk music for the whole of the last century. This song came about in the 50s. It’s been as successful as wild moun–nevermind.
The song seems inspired by an older piece written in thicker brogue, which starts like this:
Let us go, lassie, go
Tae the braes o’ Balquhidder
Whar the blueberries grow
‘Mang the bonnie Hielan’ heather
It’s something of the same song to judge by words alone. Hear the difference here. This older piece is a love song with a lot of flower picking in it, but the new song has an odd twist in the third verse.
To back up, the singer asks his lass to pick wildflowers with him, and that’s the idea of the chorus. In the second verse, he says he will build a bower by a crystal fountain for his true love and pile all the wildflowers he can find on this bower. Then he says, “If my true love she were gone/I would surely find another” among the many wildflower pickers.
Is this short shrift for the one women he loved minutes ago? That would give us an image of love being like a quickly withering wildflower or the lovers being like bees flying from one attraction to another. But because lovers in Irish songs so often die or are separated in some way, I wonder if the third verse gives us the picture of the singer standing beside his true love’s grave, asking, “Will you go pick wildflowers with us again? If you can’t, I can find someone else. I mean, everyone picks flowers on the hillside. But will you go? With me?”
I’m probably just reading into it.
I’ve learned never to look for a lot of logic in old folk songs. Also, I suspect the writer may have been reaching for a rhyme for “heather.”
True. It feels more like a stretch now that I’ve written it down. But when you remember other songs in which the daughter loves a poor man, refuses to marry a rich man, and drowns herself, my sad song spin doesn’t seem to crazy.
The version my Gaelic choral group sang is, “ I would surely find no other”, which on the face of it makes more sense!