Steeleye Span

New roots, new paths

When, in 1975, Steeleye Span recorded their version of "Long Lankin", dozens if not hundreds of recordings of the song already existed. It's a traditional, a piece whose authors and date of composition are unknown, which has belonged for centuries to the common repertoire of English musical folklore: a "standard" there to be reinterpreted, with slight variations in lyrics and music, so that the tradition stays alive and the melodies, like the stories that accompany them, are passed down from one generation to the next.

But by the mid-1970s the world of British folk was also undergoing transformation. It had been for at least a dozen years, ever since Shirley Collins and Davy Graham, with their "Folk Roots, New Routes", had kicked off a new wave of folk revival in England, driven not only by the desire to bring Britain's musical roots back into vogue but also to profoundly renew their guise. Let's be clear: the "preservation" of folk's cultural heritage has always proceeded through mutations and subversions ("tradition" and "betrayal", after all, share the same root in Italian); but it is perhaps for the first time around those years that the mechanism becomes not only conscious and deliberate, but openly flaunted and claimed.

Not preservation, but hybridization with other genres (blues, jazz, raga) becomes the imperative for a new generation of artists. In the latter half of the Sixties, the phenomenon breaks out of the folk clubs and wins over a wider audience: reworking the influences of rock and psychedelia, electric folk and progressive folk are born. By the early Seventies, the movement had produced gems all across Europe, and the Cambridge Folk Festival was drawing ten thousand people to see acts like Pentangle, the Chieftains, Planxty, the Dubliners, C.O.B... and, indeed, Steeleye Span.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the "Long Lankin" featured on the masterpiece "Commoners Crown" doesn't present "slight variations in text and music" compared to previously documented versions, but a complete overhaul. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to call it an entirely new song that, by coincidence or something close to it, happens to share the same title and the same lyrics (though, as we'll see, that last point is debatable) as a famous traditional.

Variation and continuity

Let's start from the beginning. What kind of piece is "Long Lankin", and what story does it tell? It's a classic ballad: rhyming verses following one another in the same structure throughout, with no chorus. Among traditionals, it ranks among the most celebrated, coming in sixth in the Roud catalogue and ninety-third in the Child catalogue. The numerous transcriptions made by the founding fathers of British ethnomusicography (there are versions by Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams) confirm it as a piece in 3/4 time for a solo performer, built on a natural minor scale or, in some variants, a harmonic minor.

More precisely, in narrative terms the song is a murder ballad: it recounts the dynamics of a violent event, from its origins to its consequences, often (though not always) fatal for the culprit. Here, roughly, is the story it tells: taking advantage of the lord of the house's departure for London, under cover of night the villainous Long Lankin (also called "Lamkin", "Lammikin" or "Lincoln" depending on the version) sneaks into the house through a gap. There, with the help of a "false nurse" already installed in the household, he torments the couple's baby boy, who cries and screams until he wakes his mother, sleeping upstairs. Coming down the stairs, the lady finds Long Lankin waiting for her and is stabbed to death. Shortly after, the husband returns from London to find the kitchen, the hallway and the parlour drenched in blood, and understands what has happened. Long Lankin is hanged, and the false nurse burned at a bonfire right beside him.

The song's many versions — at least two branches can be traced, a Scottish one, probably older, and an English one — differ in numerous respects: some report, others omit, Long Lankin's supposed motive (according to the Scottish branch, he'd be a vengeful mason, hired but never paid by the lord of the house); some include the killing of the child, others don't; some feature the real nurse among the characters (locked in a tower, from where she spots the lord returning and informs him of what has happened), or even the daughter born of the lady and... Long Lankin himself.

Moving from the explicit elements to the implicit ones, musicologist Vic Gammon notes that, on an ideological level, the song reflects oppositions typical of pre-industrial society. Different versions bring different aspects to the fore, but even the most divergent ones share a fourfold division of the acting characters, split along a good/evil axis on one hand and a strong/weak axis on the other. On the side of good we find the lord and lady of the house, though they differ in how effectively they embody that alignment: while the lady is unable to protect the house, the child, or even herself, the lord is able, merely by his presence, to keep Long Lankin at bay (indeed, his mere return is enough to send him to the gallows). The forces of evil, meanwhile, are represented by Long Lankin and the false nurse, who are likewise arranged in a hierarchy of effectiveness: the nurse must wait for Long Lankin to enter and merely serves as an accomplice to the character who represents the true danger.

Looking more closely at these dualisms, we can see how they're tied to further oppositions. The most obvious is how the strong/weak axis essentially collapses into a male/female one. The two female characters are marked by subservience, passivity and a basic lack of movement (the only action taken by the lady — coming down from the upper floor of the house to the lower one — leads to her death!). Long Lankin and the lord, by contrast, move from place to place, are in control of the situation, and essentially "project" their allegiance onto every section in which they appear. Secondly, it's worth noting that in some versions of the song (and, as we'll see, precisely in the Steeleye Span rendition) the terms "good" and "evil" don't quite capture the opposition between the homeowners and the intruders. Many variants, in fact, refrain from passing moral judgment on the actions of Long Lankin and the false nurse, reporting them neutrally, without any language of condemnation or disparagement. A more fitting divide, then, is between "forces of order" (the lady and lord) and "forces of chaos" (Long Lankin and the nurse), beneath which, if one likes, other dichotomies can be read. Besides the one of blood, between "lords" and their subordinates (or even outcasts, as in Long Lankin's case), particularly interesting is the one between nature and culture. While the lord and lady live in a great house with a tower, travel on horseback and are in touch with the civilization they represent, Long Lankin is an expression of the moors he inhabits: almost an ancestral spirit haunting the land, opposing the forces that seek to organize it according to economic and cultural conventions, striking them at their very heart.

The courage to break away

Steeleye Span, in the full grip of their horror fervour (see also "Little Sir Hugh", also from "Commoners Crown"), very deliberately choose to embrace all the most gruesome and fantastical details, while cutting short any contextualization or logical steps that might risk diluting the brutality of the story or dispelling its aura of mystery. And while they're at it, they completely upend the song's musical structure, moving from a slow 3/4 built on monotony to a stylistic patchwork built on three distinct sections, all in 4/4 and marked by mounting momentum.

So, at the opening, we get the crystalline, deceptively innocent voice of Maddy Prior setting the scene in direct speech: "I'm riding to London, beware of Long Lankin who lives among the moss and briars on the moor: watch out, because at the smallest crack he finds, he'll sneak into the house." Long Lankin is presented with no backstory whatsoever, almost like a bogeyman haunting the land around the lord's home, endowed with an almost supernatural stealth. The song opens languidly, but in a minor key: arpeggiated guitars, sparse drum accents and a faint carpet of Mellotron build a bucolic mood, into which a vague menace nonetheless creeps, promised by the tonality.

And so we reach the first leap. Cutting guitars, a change of rhythm, a change of key (shifting to an intermediate tonality, the Mixolydian mode). The violin enters — and with it, Long Lankin. This time it's a male voice relaying the back-and-forth with the nurse: "Where is the lord of the house?" "In London." "And the lady?" "Up in her room." "And the baby?" "Asleep in the cradle." If the melody of the first section already strayed far from the traditional versions, in this second one the common elements are gone altogether. The phrasing is terse, as terse as the dialogue itself, and the atmosphere grows tense thanks to a muscular guitar riff, backed by an ostinato violin line underneath. Breaking the cyclical structure of the verses, Steeleye Span invent a bridge where none existed before, yet they still play on repetition: all the question-and-answer pairs are musically identical, except for the line endings, which are Mixolydian for Long Lankin's lines and already major (foreshadowing what's to come) for the nurse's.

The masterstroke, however, comes now, with the chorus. Triumphantly, the announcement of the intent to kill the baby, and its scrupulous execution, are delivered in heartfelt voices and a radiant major key. Note the sheer audacity: in the very same years that hard rockers flirting with Satanism, like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, were darkening their harmonies by digging into minor keys or chilling them out with neutral chords, a traditional folk band decided that nothing could be more fitting, to narrate the moment of an infanticide, than a lovely major-key verse — the mode instinctively associated, across the whole Western canon, with joy, glory and brightness. As if that weren't enough, the same key is lavishly recalled for the three deaths that follow: that of the lady of the house, that of Long Lankin, and that of the nurse.

A nurse who — and here lies the band's other disarming stroke of cunning — turns out to be an impostor only at the end of the second chorus. A twist entirely absent from all earlier versions, which make her identity clear right from the start. But the device serves a precise thematic and narrative purpose: by withholding that information, just as Long Lankin's motive is never revealed, Steeleye Span heighten the gratuitousness and inexplicability of the evil being staged. Evil tinged with the occult, too, thanks to an unsettling detail underscored by a sudden shift into 6/4: the child's blood is collected in a cup, perhaps to make a potion (against leprosy, some claim), perhaps to complete some arcane ritual.

The mood of the tale has by now careened into territory worthy of a creepypasta (indeed, you can find one online with the very same title!), but the supernatural crescendo isn't over yet. The lady of the house returns to the scene, and, urged downstairs by Long Lankin, asks in a new bridge: "How can I see in the dark?" "Use your silver mantles!" comes the reply — a line that only hints at a further layer of magic... which is given no time to develop, since at the bottom of the stairs Long Lankin is waiting for the lady, ready to kill her.

There was blood all in the kitchen

There was blood all in the hall

There was blood all in the parlour

Where my lady she did fall

The return to the major key also marks the return of the lord of the house — and of blood, the true protagonist of this new, jubilant refrain. Cutting out every intermediate passage (the killing, the ride from London, the news being broken by the "real" nanny or the daughter), the point of view jumps straight to the lord and to the disconcerting scene that greets him as he crosses the threshold. It's left to the listener to reconstruct the dynamics of the murder — the stabbing at the foot of the stairs, the slow dragging from room to room, until the final collapse in the hearth room. Similarly, nothing is said of the search (conducted "to the East and to the West," according to some versions) for the two culprits so that they may be executed: we only learn that Long Lankin will be hanged, and the false nanny burned, like a witch. No moral judgement is expressed regarding their actions, nor regarding the punishment they suffer: it is simply the iron consequence of the narrative logic. One small curiosity: unlike in every other version, Maddy Prior fully pronounces the final vowels of "hanged" and "burned," a "regularization" that is certainly not accidental, and is probably proposed to emphasize the folk character of the tradition being drawn upon.

The last — as will have been noticed — of the countless liberties taken by Steeleye Span for their version, the song does not close on the deaths of Long Lankin and the false nanny. Completing a fully parenthetical structure, it instead returns to the opening verse, which gives way to an instrumental fade-out. Behind this stylistic choice there are certainly reasons of symmetry, but it's easy to also read this "rewinding" of the narrative as a sign of the legend being handed down, travelling from one performer to another and renewing itself with each passage.

Was it true folk?

Steeleye Span borrowed a folk story, cut up and reworked its text as they saw fit, and wove around it a completely new piece of music (a suite, one might have to call it). Now, the question of questions. Is the Steeleye Span version really the traditional "Long Lankin"?

Perhaps not, but it certainly belongs to the tradition. However atypical in its overall form — shorter in text but longer in duration than any previous version — the final song is made up of individual parts that, melodically and harmonically, sit in absolute continuity with the compositional schemes typical of British folklore. And while, in orchestrating their own version of the text, the band does everything possible to strip away the social subtext of the events narrated, it must be acknowledged that there isn't a single line that appears invented out of whole cloth: everything is the result of a cut-and-paste guided by meticulous study of the many variants in circulation.

But an appropriate answer cannot ignore the era in which this happened. These are the years in which Pentangle merge "Hunting Song" and "Vent fin, vent du matin" into a single piece, Fairport Convention turn the five verses of "The Bonny Bunch of Roses" into a twelve-and-a-half-minute epic Napoleonic retelling, and Comus went in search of the most darkly ancient sound using exclusively brand-new pieces. We should be grateful to that unrepeatable period if traditional folk today still consists, in large part, of this: expansion, reinvention, creation.

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02/04/2026