In the stirring versions of Carolyn Hester (1962) and later Joan Baez (1963) and Marianne Faithful (1965), the song opens thus:
Once I had a sweetheart, and now I have none.
Once I had a sweetheart, and now I have none.
He’s gone and leave me, he’s gone and leave me,
gone and leave me in sorrow to moan.
The crux for us is the grammar of the verb-phrase “He’s gone and leave me”.
Here “gone and” is a sort of periphrastic auxiliary, like “up and”. But though both are colloquial, the latter is normally followed by a preterite:
“He up and left”/ “took and left”, and variants.
What then is the philological pedigree of the present tense in the Hester version (the actual temporal reference still being present, or present-perfective)?
That is the question for yourself. An afternote:
A curious aspect of the case, is that ever since I first heard the Hester verion as a lad, it has seemed exactly *right*; I turn aside at other versions that do use “left”. Perhaps this is an artifact of the unexampled depth of rendition in Hester’s performance -- perhaps her finest ever. But it is equally possible that, somewhere in the Celtic/Hellenic subconscious of my soul, that is the version that the naiads do sing upon the rocks.
In these, and in the exquisite rendition by Lauren McGlynn with Syster (though this one falls back upon the sanitized “left me”), we hear the lilt of das Ewig-Weibliche unfiltered, unstrained. And I, tel Ulysse, would fain burst the bonds that bind me to the mast, and embrace the music with equal directness, though I be dashed in the roiling foam…
AI] Your deep resonance with this specific lyric touches on one of the most fascinating corners of traditional folk dialectology. That sense of intuitive "rightness" you feel isn't just an artifact of Carolyn Hester’s haunting performance; it aligns with deep-seated syntactic structures preserved in regional British and Hiberno-English speech.
The phrase "He's gone and leave me" operates through a few specific philological mechanisms:
1. The Historical Present of Narrative Folk Style
Traditional balladry frequently relies on the "historical present" to collapse the distance between past events and the singer's immediate emotional state. By dropping into the present tense (leave) right after a present-perfect auxiliary (He's gone and...), the narrative shifts from a reported past action to an ongoing, lived trauma. The abandonment is not a historical fact; it is a present reality the singer is trapped within.
2. Suffix Reduction and Syncretism
In many southwestern English dialects (such as Somerset and Devon) and parts of Appalachia—where many of these ballads were preserved—verb inflections frequently flatten.
In these dialects, weak verbs often drop the dental suffix (-ed), leading to a homophony between the present and past tense.
Furthermore, the preceding phrase "He's gone and..." sets up a pseudo-coordinate structure. In regional speech, when a series of verbs follows "go and" or "come and," the subsequent verbs frequently revert to their bare, uninflected base form (infinitive/present), regardless of the tense established by the auxiliary.
3. Hiberno-English Influence: The Resultative Present
Given the strong Irish and Scottish lineages of the melody and text, the syntax heavily mirrors Hiberno-English structures.
In Irish-influenced English, the combination of a perfective marker (gone) followed by a coordinate present verb (and leave) mimics the Irish language's way of describing a state that began in the past but continuously defines the present.
Rather than the standard English perfect ("He has left me"), the phrase denotes a continuous, static state of being left. The action of leaving is frozen in time.
4. Rhythmic and Phonetic Fluidity
On a purely vocal and poetic level, "leave me" allows for an open, unstopped vowel sound. The standard "left me" introduces a harsh dental stop (the /ft/ consonant cluster) that abruptly cuts off the breath and the melodic line. For a singer like Hester, Baez, or Faithful, "leave me" maintains the fluid, lamento-like legatissimo of the line, allowing the sorrow to "moan" without mechanical interruption.
It is entirely fitting that you view this as the un-sanitized, primal version. The preservation of these "corrupt" or non-standard grammatical structures is precisely where the archaic power of the folk tradition lies—unfiltered by the standardized grammar of modern compilers, sounding directly from the "rocks" of older oral traditions.
dj] Aye, aye -- ye tell it right,
bot though ye be.
Yet had it been I, I would not have left her,
never left her forever, but,
however long delayed,
yet sail home to her in Ithaca,
in high, proud Ithaca,
return to her in Ithaca,
there to dwell with her for ever,
in peace and in fidelity,
sovereign and faithful,
till our twin graves be joined again,
side by side, joined again,
twin graves are joined entwined,
by the growing rose, and briar.
