Fair and Pretty Ladies- Mrs. G.A. Griffin (GA) 1877 Morris B
[My abbreviated title. From: Folksongs of Florida, Morris, 1950. His notes follow. Griffin moved to Florida about 1877 and learned this from her father, a fiddler and singer, before she left Georgia.
R. Matteson 2017]
This is a song with the conventional "Come-All-Ye" opening common to many Irish songs and folk hymns. In Variant A an effective use of oxymoron occurs in stanzas 4 and 5 in the phrase "false true lover." The concluding stanza of Variant A strikes the profound note of disillusionment in love so poignantly expressed in the old English song "Waillie, Waillie." Sharp includes "Little Sparrow" in his Folk-Songs of English Origin, 1st series, p. 88.
For other American versions, see Cox, pp. 419-421; Wyman and Brockway, II, p.55; IAFL, XXIX, 184; XLIV, 101-102; Campbell and Sharp, pp. 220-222; Hudson, pp. 111, 167; Sharp, II, 136; Henry, FSSM, pp. 219-260; Belden, pp. 477-478; McGill, p. 2i; Shearin and Combs, p. 26; Thomas, p. 82; Cambiaire, p. 61; Brewster, p. 328; Davis, Folksongs, pp. 80-81; and Randolph, I, 315.
B. "Come All You Fair And Pretty Ladies." Recorded from the singing of Mrs. G. A. Griffin, Newberry, who learned the song from her father, Mr. John R. Hart, Dooly County, Georgia, when she was a young girl living near Adel, Georgia.
Come all you fair and pretty ladies;
Take warning how you love young men.
They'll shine like a flower on some summer's morning;
They'll shine so bright, but they'll soon decay.
They'll tell to you some love-like story;
They'll tell you that they love you well;
But the way they'll go and court another,
And say their love is not for you.
I wish I were some little swallow,
And one of those had wings to fly,
Wherever you might go that I might follow,
And in his breast that I might flutter.
I am not no little swallow,
Nor none of those have wings to fly.
I'll stay down here and sleep and slumber,
And sing and pass my time away.