Listen to Annie Laurie
(Jamie vocals
Michael Smith, guitar and bass
recorded on Swimming Deeper)
Annie Laurie
Maxwelton’s braes are bonnie,
Where early fa’s the dew,
Twas there that Annie Laurie
Gi’ed me her promise true.
Gi’ed me her promise true –
Which ne’er forgot will be,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and dee.
Her brow is like the snaw-drift,
Her neck is like the swan,
Her face it is the fairest,
That ‘er the sun shone on.
That ‘er the sun shone on –
And dark blue is her e’e,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and dee.
Like dew on gowans lying,
Is the fa’ o’ her fairy feet,
And like winds, in simmer sighing,
Her voice is low and sweet.
Her voice is low and sweet –
And she’s a’ the world to me;
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and dee.
Annie Laurie was a favorite song of Studs Terkel. And he loved it when I sang it. He told me it was the song Albert Parsons, the Haymarket martyr sang the night before he died. I sang it for his 90th birthday and his memorial. My great Uncle Tex wrote of it in his autobiography Roving and Fighting. As a soldier of fortune, he was far from home on a pier in China when he heard a Scottish lad playing his accordion and weeping as he sang Annie Laurie. I knew it as the theme song in the Katharine Hepburn version of Little Women.
So beautiful, Jamie.