A 400-year-old folk song about a drowned cabin boy came with immigrants from the British Isles to the New World, evolved, and was passed down by oral tradition in Appalachia. It settled there in Poor Valley, Virginia, with the Carter Family, who ­recorded it in 1935. In that one song is the ety­mology of the entire folk- and country-music tradition. Celtic ballads, sea shanties, history songs, and the old Child Ballads — a collection of mournful laments dating to late-19th-century England and Scotland — all contain the seeds of a treasury of music that came to define, in part, what it means to be American. 

The song “Merry Golden Tree” began in the 17th century as “The Sweet Trinity,” and was variously identified over the centuries as “The Golden Vanity” and “The Golden Willow Tree.” It tells the story of a ship beset by an enemy. A cabin boy tells the captain he can save the Sweet Trinity by swimming to the enemy ship and drilling nine holes in its bottom. The captain promises to reward him with gold and his own daughter to marry if he succeeds. The boy sinks the enemy ship, but the captain reneges, and the little cabin boy is left to drown in the “lonesome low.” The verses altered a bit over time, and the melody moved a note or two. There are perhaps a hundred different versions, but the story and haunting melody remained the same: The captain always betrays the cabin boy, and the boy is always left to drown.

Once the song reached Appalachia, the Carter Family recorded it as “Sinking in the Lonesome Sea.” It traveled again — through the South and then north, to the Great Lakes. In 1949, Jean Ritchie, one of the great Appalachian balladeers, recorded it with Alan Lomax, under the title “The Merry Golden Tree.” A decade later, Lomax captured a field recording of a woman named Almeda Riddle singing an a cappella version at her home in Cleburne County, Arkansas.

By that time, it had jumped the musical tracks, marrying two traditions essential to the American songbook: In 1952, Aaron Copland recorded a version in his Old American Songs, Set II. He modified the melody a bit, but the unsettling feeling is intact, and the poor cabin boy (in this telling, a “carpenter boy”) — well, you know what happened to him. 

Listening to the various iterations and interpretations of “The Merry Golden Tree” is like touching the past and tracing the path of immigration, and acknowledging what we chose to keep as we came from the Old World to the new. We know how to shape-shift — it’s something Americans do really well. We have a national inclination to borrow from tradition, rearrange the DNA, fold in our own history, and create something that is distinctly American, with a legacy centuries older than we actually are. And some of that legacy arrived on ships.

ROSANNE CASH is a singer-songwriter, musician, author, and a fierce advocate for speech and expression. She was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015.