A Fraudulent "Elfin Knight" from West Virginia
by Bernth Lindfors
Source: Western Folklore, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Apr., 1968), pp. 107-111
[Both Woofter and Gainer's versions have the same chorus (second line). You can listen to Gainer's variant here:
http://www.libraries.wvu.edu/wvconline/patrickgainer/Sng2Goingto%20CalhounFair.mp3]
Fraudulent "Elfin Knight" from West Virginia
BERNTH LINDFORS
THE STUDENT COLLECTOR is a boon to folksong scholarship because he does what the professional folksong scholar too often does not do-he collects folksongs. His collections have enriched folksong archives, folksong research, and even folksong scholars. Unfortunately, the student collector is also the bane of folksong scholarship because he sometimes yields to the temptation to do his work dishonestly. Pressured by his folksong professor to collect a certain number of songs, he may turn away from the pure stream of oral tradition and fish for his quota in the library. Or he may decide to compose a ballad or two. Every university folksong archive has been polluted with plagiarized and bogus folksongs "collected" by irresponsible students.[1]
This paper is offered as an expose of one fraudulent ballad text in the Josiah H. Combs collection, Western Kentucky Folklore Archive, UCLA. It is hoped that a description of how the fraud was perpetrated and discovered will help others working with similar materials in similar archives.
The fraudulent text is one of four unpublished texts of "The Elfin Knight" (Child 2) in the Combs collection. A study was made of the four texts to determine where they belonged in the Anglo- American tradition of this ballad. Eighty (45 American, 35 British) published texts of the ballad were examined, and significant similarities and differences between the published and the unpublished texts were noted. In the course of this investigation it became clear that one of the four unpublished texts had been copied from a published text. The plagiarizer had tried to cover his tracks by changing certain words and phrases, but these changes, viewed in the light of the other texts studied, only made it easier to follow his trail and to establish his guilt. The fraudulent text, which is said to have been collected "from the singing of William Bush, Index, West Virginia" (no date given), reads as follows:
The Elfin Knight (Child, No. 2)
1. As I walked out in yonder dell,
A-hie-a-marukee-mirandy-o,
I met a fair damsel, her name it was Nell,
Rollickum-bollickum-dandy-o.
2. "I want you to make me a cambric shirt
Without any seam or needlework,
And then you shall be a true sweetheart of mine.
3. "I want you to wash it on yonder hill,
Where dew never was nor rain never fell,
And then you shall be a true sweetheart of mine.
4. "I want you to dry it on yonder bush,
Where tree never blossomed since Adam was born,
And then you shall be a true sweetheart of mine."
5. "And since you have asked three questions of me,
And now I will ask as many of thee,
And then I will be a true sweetheart of thine.
6. "I want you to buy me an acre of land
Between the salt sea and the salt sand,
And then I will be a true sweetheart of thine.
7. "I want you to plow it with an ox's horn,
And plant it all over with one kernel of corn,
And then I will be a true sweetheart of thine.
8. "I want you to hoe it with a peacock's feather,
And thrash it all out with the sting of an adder,
And then I will be a true sweetheart of thine."
The model for this text was a Massachusetts text published by Kittredge in JAF in 1894 and reprinted in the second set of "Additions and Corrections" in the final volume of Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads in 1898.[2]
1. As I walked out in yonder dell,
Let ev'ry rose grow merry in time
I met a fair damsel, her name it was Nell,
I said, "Will you be a true lover of mine?
2. "I want you to make me a cambric shirt
Without any seam or needlework,
And then you shall be a true lover of mine.
3. "I want you to wash it on yonder hill,
Where dew never was nor rain never fell.
4. "I want you to dry it on yonder thorn,
Where tree never blossomed since Adam was born."
5. "And since you have asked three questions of me,
Let ev'ry rose grow merry in time
Now and I will ask as many of thee,
And then I will be a true lover of thine.
6. "I want you to buy me an acre of land
Between the salt sea and the sea-sand,
And then, etc.
7. "I want you to plough it with an ox's horn,
And plant it all over with one kernel of corn.
8. "I want you to hoe it with a peacock's feather
And thrash it all out with the sting of an adder,
And then," etc.
The Combs text differs from the Kittredge text in only six details. The most remarkable difference is in the refrain of the first stanza. The Combs text has an unusual interlaced nonsense refrain, "A-hie-amarukee- mirandy-o ... /Rollickum-bollickum-dandy-o," while the Kittredge text has a more conventional interlaced refrain, "Let ev'ry rose grow merry in time... / I said, 'Will you be a true lover of mine?'"
Bertrand H. Bronson has noted that the "musical records of this ballad fall into three main groups, each with its own style of verbal refrain." [3] The meaningful refrain of the Kittredge text places it in a group which Bronson identifies as "the sturdiest branch of tradition," the form most widespread and most popular in both Britain and America. The nonsense refrain in the first stanza of the Combs text would seem to place it in another group, but the last line of the refrain changes in the following stanzas to a version of the Kittredge refrain, "And then you shall be a true sweetheart of mine."
One wonders whether the absence of the first line of the nonsense refrain in stanzas 2-8 means that this line drops out after the first stanza or whether its absence means that we are to assume that "A-hiea-marukee-mirandy-o" remains intact throughout, even though "mirandy-o" does not rhyme with "sweetheart of mine." The change from the interlaced nonsense refrain of the first stanza to the meaningful refrain, be it interlaced or terminal, in the remaining stanzas arouses our suspicions about the integrity of the Combs text. How common is it for a ballad singer to change from a nonsense refrain to a meaningful refrain partway through a ballad?
Not one of the 80 texts examined contained a change of this sort. The differences between stanzas 2-8 in the Combs text and the same stanzas in the Kittredge text are not differences in structure or syntax; they are merely differences in choice of words. For example, the "new" refrain in the second stanza of the Combs text ends with "true sweetheart of mine" while this refrain in the Kittredge text ends with "true lover of mine." This seems an insignificant changemerely the substitution of one commonplace for another-until we discover that 54 of the 80 texts examined have a terminal refrain of this sort, and that 53 of these 54 have the adjective-noun combination "true love" or "true lover" (the one exception being an Irish text in which the adjective "sweet" is substituted for "true," producing "sweet lover"). Only in the Combs text does the substitution of the noun "sweetheart" for "love" or "lover" occur. Obviously, "true sweetheart of mine" is not commonplace but out of place in this ballad.
Another slight but perhaps significant difference in wording is found in the first line of stanza 4, which in the Combs text concludes with "dry it on yonder bush" and in the Kittredge text with "dry it on yonder thorn." The word "bush" is evidently a corruption because it does not rhyme, as "thorn" does, with "born," the last word of the next narrative line.
Other differences are more trivial. The second narrative line in stanza 5, of the Combs text begins with "And now I will ask...," while the same line in the Kittredge text begins "Now and I will ask...." The only difference between these two stanzas is the transposition of the first two words in this line. The second narrative line in stanza 6 of the Combs text reads "Between the salt sea and the salt sand," while the same line in the Kittredge text reads "Between the salt sea and the sea-sand." Again the difference is a difference of only one word. In the next stanza the difference is merely a matter of spelling: the Combs text uses "plow"; the Kittredge text, "plough."
Except for the refrain in the first stanza, all of the differences between these two texts are very slight verbal differences, and we have good reason to be suspicious of two of them-"bush" and "sweetheart." Aside from these differences, the texts are identical. They contain the same number of stanzas, the same dialogue structure, and the same motifs set in the same order. More remarkable, they contain the same diction and the same punctuation. Oral tradition may be very conservative, but can it be so tenacious in matters of punctuation and diction? Is it possible that a particular ballad text collected in Massachusetts in the 1890's could be collected again virtually verbatim in West Virginia several decades later?
It seems obvious that we are dealing with a fraudulent text, probably the plagiaristic labor of a student "collector." D. K. Wilgus has recently warned us of texts in the J. H. Combs collection which have been fabricated by students.[4] This text of Child 2 could have been used as a case in point. A student would know from reading the texts of "The Elfin Knight" in the first volume of Child that this ballad often has an interlaced nonsense refrain, but he might not realize that the nonsense refrain never appears in those versions of the ballad which have a "true lover of mine" refrain terminating each stanza.
The student-plagiarist would be clever enough to copy an inconspicuous text, such as one in the second set of "Additions and Corrections" in the last volume of Child, and he certainly would know enough to change or rearrange the words of his purloined text, but he might lack the wisdom or energy to change the diction and punctuation in the text, and, knowing the ballad only through Child, he might make the blunder of entitling his text "The Elfin Knight," even though no elfin knight appears in it. The student-plagiarist would probably have little or no notion of the tradition of the ballad he was plagiarizing; he would not know how unusual or how common his source text was. For example, there are elements in the Kittredge text which are very rare[5]-a "damsel" named "Nell" (stanza 1), "an ox's horn" (stanza 7), "hoe it with a peacock's feather" and "sting of an adder" (stanza 8)-and which do not occur together except in the Kittredge text. Duplication of these elements in the Combs text is final and conclusive proof that the Combs text has been copied from the Kittredge text, and that this "Elfin Knight" from West Virginia is in fact an impostor, a bastard Child spawned by an insincere student of balladry.
University of California, Los Angeles
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Footnotes:
1. Students are not the only culprits. Vance Randolph and Frances Emberson have cast some doubt on the authenticity of a Child ballad published by Professor John Robert Moore (see JAF, LX [1947], 117). I am indebted to Professor D. K. Wilgus for this reference.
2. JAF, VII (1894), 228, and ESPB, V (1898), 284. Child's transcription is reproduced here.
3. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, I (Princeton, 1959), 9.
4. "The Oldest (?) Text of 'Edward,'" WF, XXV (1966), 88-92. Wilgus believes that this particular text of "The Elfin Knight" may have been "collected" for Combs by Carey Woofter while Combs was teaching at West Virginia University from 1922 to 1924.
5 For example, of the 45 American texts examined, the Kittredge text was the only one in which the girl was identified by name; of the 35 British texts, only one Irish and two Scottish texts named the girl "Nell" or "Nelly." Moreover, of the 80 texts, the Kittredge text was the only one to contain a reference to plowing with "an ox's horn." The "peacock's feather"-"sting of an adder" combination was found in one Irish, one Scottish and four (three from New England) American texts, but the word. ing of these lines was never the same as that in the Kittredge text; the Combs text, on the other hand, repeats the Kittredge text verbatim.