Lowlands (Away) (Roud 681; Henry H469)

It often happens that long ballads become whittled down into short lyrical songs. The dwindling of Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship into I Gave My Love a Cherry is a case in point. So too some forgotten narrative ballad of the return of a ghostly lover has survived as a lyrical fragment that sometimes turns up as a windlass or capstan shanty. No doubt the original ballad is old; the tune has an antique grandeur; yet in the form in which it is sung here it probably does not pre-date the nineteenth century. Negro cotton lumpers in the southern ports of USA had a special affection for this very English tune.
— Read on mainlynorfolk.info/anne.briggs/songs/lowlands.html