Mick Haywood's Song Wordbook

Batley Years

Leeds Years Batley Years
Picture of coal mining pithead machinery

Bullcroft Colliery Pithead winding gear

Died For Love


There are a great number of variants of this widespread popular love song with a considerable number of titles to suit. It is commonly known as, ‘Died for Love’, ‘I Wish, I Wish’, ‘A Bold/Brisk Young Farmer/Sailor’, ‘There is A Tavern/Alehouse’ and it has a myriad of offspring.

I got this version of the song in 1966 from ‘Nana Bruce’, Mrs. Annie Bruce of Skellow, Doncaster, my first wife Sandra's grandmother. The Bruce family were originally from Peterlee in County Durham, the family moved to Yorkshire in the early 1950s. At that time many of the Durham Coalfield’s collieries were closing, but there were plenty of vacancies for skilled mineworkers in the South Yorkshire Coalfield. To attract miners to move to the areas where vacancies existed, the miners were offered a job and a new home. They were housed on new council house estates specifically built to accommodate them. It was to a new home in Skellow and a job at the nearby Bullcroft Colliery that the Bruce family moved.

Died for Love

1. Its down the green meadows where the young girls do go
A gathering flowers just as they grow.
She gathered flowers of every kind
But left the sweetest flower behind.

2. There is a flower, so some folks say
That’ll never die or fade away.
If I that flower could easily find
It would ease my heart and torment his mind.

3. There is an Ale House in yonder town
Where my love goes and sits him down.
He takes a strange girl on his knee
And don’t you think that’s a grief to me.
 
4. A grief and a grief and I’ll tell you for why,
Because she’s got more gold than I
But her gold will glitter, and her beauty will fly
And she’ll come like me a poor girl sometime.

5. I wish my baby it was born
Sat smiling on its Daddies knee
And, me poor girl was dead and gone
With, the long green grass growing over me.

6. I wish I wish but it’s all in vain
I wish I was a maid again
But, a maid, a maid I never will be
‘Till green apples grow on an orange tree.

7. So, dig my grave and dig it deep
Put a marble stone at my head and feet
And, in the middle a Turtle Dove
To show the world that I died for love.

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About Mick

Mick Haywood is a traditional folk singer & folk song collector who has run and organised folk clubs and festivals for many years. He now lives in Whitby, North Yorkshire.

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