Track 1

Sovay

Mar 11, 2025

Sovay, Sovay, all on a day,
She dressed herself in man’s array….

(*please note - I’ll be sending you an email every day for the next 9 days after this with all the songs until release day - if you do not wish to receive all these feel free to unsubscribe to this section - don’t want to get on your nerves!)

This is a great upbeat song. Me and my sis do a version together (scroll to the bottom to see that) and it’s a real thing to get that first note, knowing when to come in with the harp.

On my soon-to-be-released album this is an unaccompanied song, as are all the others.1 This is the only solo version I have on Youtube. I was strolling over the fields near my mum’s house last year when I filmed it.

Sovay is the story of a woman who wants to test the loyalty of her lover and so dresses as a man. Then..

With a sword and pistol all by her side
To meet her true love, to meet her true love, away did ride

It’s sometimes also called ‘The Female Highwayman’ (though I have never come across it thus named).

Disguised as a man, she meets him while “riding over the plain” and utters those well known words:

“Stand and deliver, kind sir,” she said,
“And if you do not, and if you do not, I’ll shoot you dead.”

I can’t actually recall where I learnt this song (even though Anne Briggs does a version too, it was not from her). The one I sing is most likely an amalgamation of a few different versions…it was so long ago now that I cannot even find it on the whole of YouTube!2

I’m not normally a fan of the ‘folk revival’ stuff but this version by Pentangle is quite decent.

Anyway, next in the song he hands over his watch and his gold not suspecting a thing, BUT when she asks him for “that diamond ring that I see you wear” he says NO WAY!!

“Oh with that ring I will never part,
For ‘tis a token from my sweetheart.
Shoot and be damned, you rogue,” said he,
“And you’ll be hanged, you’ll be hanged for murdering me.”

The following day when he realises how she had tricked him he feels quite daft about it and she admits what she’d done and returns his things to him

Next morning in the garden green
Young Sovay and her true love were seen;
When he spied his watch hanging by her clothes
Which made him blush, lads, which made him blush, lads, like any rose.
“Why do you blush you silly young thing,
I meant to have that diamond ring.
’Twas I who robbed you all on the plain
So here’s your watch, love, here’s your watch and your gold again.”

She admits she was just testing him and in actual fact if he HAD given her the ring that was when she’d have killed him.

“I only did it for to know
If you would be a man or no;
And if you’d have given me that ring,” she said,
“I’d have pulled that trigger, I’d have pulled that trigger and shot you dead.”

The woman in this song is sometimes also called “Celia”, “Cecilia” or “Sylvia” but the name “Sovay” itself seems to be an unusual one, possibly a corruption of “Sophie”.

According to Mainly Norfolk (the very informative online directory of folk songs and their history that I quote a lot from)….

“A number of versions have been collected in various parts of England, New England, and Eastern Canada”

I love how songs have been transported around the world with the movement of our people

“A version called Silvy Gay, from the singing of Henry Burton in Roulette, Pennsylvania, was published in Shoemaker’s Mountain Minstrelsy of Pennsylvania (1931).”

BUT coming back to England…

“Sovay was collected in 1911 from William Pratley of Ascott-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, by Cecil Sharp”

This is the first song on my new album (out in less that two weeks time). Look out for track 2 tomorrow.