RANDAL AND RONALD
HAT familiar phenomenon"when once you hear of some unusual thing it keeps cropping up again and again," or, as I’m sure some American psychologist has called it, "univalued multiplication of extroverted recognition"came my way last week. One evening from 1YC I heard a skilful NZBS production of Terence Tiller’s The Ballad of Lord Randal, in which the variants of this old song were discussed, and some interesting theories of its origin ~advanced. In the course of this, I learnt that "Lord Ronald" was one of the Scottish versions of the name. And, lo! next evening during the Edinburgh Festival Ceilidh (or Scottish musical gettogether) from 1YA, the commentator announced " ‘Lord Randal’ or ‘Lord Ronald’ as we call it in the North," which was sung to the tune of "Villikins and his Dinah." Ah, the weird world of folk-song! But this accidental conjunction did illustrate the often unexpected ways in which radio can add to our knowledge and enrich our enjoyment of things. The rather tangled argument in the NZBS feature, interesting though it was, seemed just a little unreal, but the spontaneous singing of the song in the Ceilidh proved that all the scholarly anatomising in the world can’t keep a good song down.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 781, 9 July 1954, Page 10
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207RANDAL AND RONALD New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 781, 9 July 1954, Page 10
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