A village scolding and its answer. The chorus asks Lillie why she has grown so bold, and each verse is Lillie answering back, with the last word every time.
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The story
Lillie Gal is a traditional Guyanese folk song in Creolese, number 30 in the songbook. Nobody knows who made it up. It is a scolding and an answer: the village asks Lillie why she has grown so bold, and Lillie answers back.
The chorus is the question: “Lillie gal, Lillie gal, wha mek yuh brazen so?” Each verse is Lillie’s answer, and each answer ends on her own words, “dah mek ah brazen so.”
Musically the verse rises to a high D the first time and comes home to G the second, so every verse sounds like a reply that has the last word.
In the first verse Lillie’s whole defence is her age: she is out of fourteen and going into fifteen, and to her that is reason enough to speak up for herself.
The song captures something every village knew: the elders watching closely over the girls and young people, and the young ones pushing to be treated as grown. Songs like this let both sides laugh about it.
On Guyana’s coast, the dam is the raised earth embankment along the canals and the sea, and the path on top of it was the village road. Everybody walked the dam, and everybody on it could be seen.
So in the second verse, when Lillie says a man held her hand on the dam, she is telling the whole village something it could already see for itself.
The song is printed as number 30 in One Hundred Folk Songs of Guyana, compiled by Lynette Dolphin for the Ministry of Education and Cultural Development (Georgetown, 1996), the main collection of these songs. The 1970 Emmel Singers LP Bamboo Fire and Other Folk Songs of Guyana, which Dolphin directed, includes a track called “Lily Gal and Carrie”. I could not confirm whether it uses this tune.