Royal Robes- Sheldon (MI) pre1935 Gardner B
[My title. Fragment from Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan by Elizabeth Gardner and Geraldine Jencks Chickering, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press: 1939. This version (B) could be many years older.
R. Matteson 2014]
LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF KNIGHT
(Child, No. 4)
Michigan A, except that it has an introductory stanza and that the elf knight has degenerated into a false knight, is very similar, as are many other versions, to Child F, which is reprinted from The Roxburghe Ballads, III, 449, dated by Ebsworth, the editor, about 1765. Michigan B is most like stanza 6 of Child E; Michigan C, like Child C and D Davis, pp. 62-85, gives many references and twenty-eight variants under sixteen titles collected in Virginia For further discussion, versions, and references see Marms Barbeau and Edward Sapir, Folk. Songs of French Canada (New Haven, 1925), pp 22-29, Barbour, JAFL, XLIX, 213-214, Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, pp 14-34, Cox, pp 3-17, Eddy, No. 1; Fauset, p 109, Flanders and Brown, pp. 190-192; Greenleaf and Mansfield, pp. 3-6, Mackenzie, pp. 3-8, Sandburg, pp. 60-61; Scarborough, pp. 126-128; and Sharp, I, 5-13.
B. Royal Robes. Sung in 1935 by Mrs Clara Sheldon, Alger, who was born near Paw Paw, Michigan. She learned the song from her mother, who came to Michigan in 1860 from near Port Dover, Canada Mrs. Sheldon related the story, but could sing only one stanza. With music:
Take off, take off, those royal robes,
And deliver them unto me.
For me-thinks they are too beautiful,
To lie in the deep, deep sea,
To lie in the deep, deep sea.