Margaret Jeffrey sang When I Was a Young Maid to Peter Kennedy and Hamish Henderson in the berryfields at Blairgowrie, Perthshire, in July 1955. Steve Roud noted:
The Female Drummer was collected regularly in England and Scotland, but more rarely in Ireland or North America, and appeared on numerous broadsides and garlands, dating back to about 1800. The broadsides claim that she fought with the Duke of York at the Siege of Valenciennes, which took place in 1793 during the French Revolution, but the traditional texts have all discarded this historical detail. The motif of women dressing as men is fairly common in British folk song, but the reason is usually to accompany or find a sweetheart who has gone to war. Our drummer girl, however, seems to have enlisted for the sheer hell of it.
Harry Cox sang The Female Drummer at home in Catfield, Norfolk, in 1955 to Ewan MacColl. This recording was included in 2000 on his Topic anthology, The Bonny Labouring Boy. Steve Roud noted:
A firm favourite with 20th century traditional singers, being found all over England, quite commonly in Scotland, but more rarely in Ireland and North America. Nearly all the major 19th century broadside printers included it on their sheets, which probably accounts for the song’s remarkable textual stability across time and space. The earliest known printing is on an Evans (London) broadside of about 1810 in the Madden Collection at Cambridge University Library.
Lal & Norma Waterson sang The Pretty Drummer Boy in 1965 on the Watersons’ album A Yorkshire Garland. A.L. Lloyd noted on the original album:
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was not unheard of for girls to dress as boys and enlist in the army or navy. Christiana Welsh fought for Marlborough with distinction and ended up as a Chelsea pensioner. Another bold Amazon, Hannah Snell, being wounded during the West Indies campaign against the French and Dutch, extracted the bullet from herself to avoid being unmasked as a woman. The dashing Mary Read served as both soldier and sailor before she became notorious as the Female Pirate. None of them, however, had the charm and sauciness of the female drummer boy, whose ballad, travelled as far north as Aberdeen where Gavin Greig reported it as “well known”. Percy Grainger got this present version from a Yorkshire-born singer on the “wrong” side of the Humber, at Barton [in Lincolnshire].
The Digital Tradition comments: Collected by Percy Grainger and sung by A.L. Lloyd and the Watersons. This is one of the many songs in which a young girl dresses up as a man and joins the Army. This one is special because there’s no lover involved nor does she become pregnant. The second verse refers to the habit of punishing the young servicemen (drummer boys, midshipmen etc.) for petty offenses with lashes on the bare bottom while being bent over breech of a cannon. I would really like to know how she pulled off the trick of not being found out.
Steeleye Span learned this song from the Watersons and recorded it in 1971 as Female Drummer for their second album, Please to See the King; it was also put on the B-side of their single Rave On. The song starts with something close to a rock riff and has the melody played in Ashley Hutchings’ bass with Maddy’s joyful voice intermingled with Peter Knight’s soaring violin. Steeleye Span performed this live for the BBC radio programme “Peel’s Sunday Concert” on 15 September 1971.
From: https://mainlynorfolk.info/watersons/songs/thefemaledrummer.html
