Defiled Is My Name

Album: not on an album (1929)

Songfacts®:

  • Anne Boleyn is best known as the second wife of Henry VIII, and the first to be murdered by the tyrant, an act that was celebrated in verse by Weston, Weston & Lee in the ghoulish "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm."

    Anne was though one of the best-educated women of her day and a multi-instrumentalist. While interned in the Tower of London awaiting the executioner's axe, she is said to have written two poems.

    "Defiled Is My Name" was set to music by a contemporary composer with the fitting name Robert Johnson. Like the provenance of the poem, Johnson's dates are uncertain. The song is also known perhaps more fittingly as "Queen Anne's Lament."

    It was arranged as a unison song by the soprano Ursula Greville and published in 1929 by J. Curwen of London. >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England

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