Related Songs
The song "The Whistling Gypsy" also describes a lady running off with a "gypsy rover". However, there is no melancholy, no hardship and no conflict. Her father rides after her and discovers that the "gypsy" is really a rich lord.
The song "Lizzie Lindsay" has a similar theme. Robert Burns adapted the song into "Sweet Tibby Dunbar," a shorter version of the story. There is also a children's version by Elizabeth Mitchell which has lyrical content changed to be about a young girl "charming hearts of the ladies", and sailing "across the deep blue sea, where the skies are always sunny".
Although the hero of this song is often called "Johnny Faa" or even "Davy Faa," he should not be confused with the hero/villain of "Davy Faa (Remember the Barley Straw)." as deriving from "Child 120," which is actually "Robin Hood's Death." According to The Faber Book of Ballads the name Faa was common among Gypsies in the 17th century.
Read more about this topic: The Gypsy Laddie
Famous quotes containing the words related and/or songs:
“So universal and widely related is any transcendent moral greatness, and so nearly identical with greatness everywhere and in every age,—as a pyramid contracts the nearer you approach its apex,—that, when I look over my commonplace-book of poetry, I find that the best of it is oftenest applicable, in part or wholly, to the case of Captain Brown.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How learned he bitter songs of lost Iambe,
Or that a cup-shaped breast is nothing vile?”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)