Barbara Allen- Case (MO) pre1916 Belden M
[From Belden: Ballads and Songs 1940. His notes follow.
R. Matteson 2015]
Barbara Allen
(Child 84)
whether originally a stage song (as might be conjectured from Pepys's entry of January, 1666) or not, Barbara Allen, has become, and remains, the most widely known and sung of all the ballads admitted by Child to his collection. Its persistence in print-broadside, stall, and songbook-down to the present might be looked upon as cause or as effect of its popularity; probably it is both. At least it is probable that most of the marks of its form in recent reports are due to printed versions. Child had a number of American texts but considered none of them worthy of mention. He knew too of versions in which the rover makes bequests to Barbara, but considered them base matter, not fit for preservation. It might be convenient to list some of the features by which modern texts are distinguished. One is the time of year. In most texts, including child B, a seventeenth century English broadside, it is the merry month of May, when green buds they are swelling, or all equivalent; in others it is Martinmas, when the leaves are falling (Child A, Ord, LL, one of the Maine and one of the Nova Scotia texts, and six from the Southern states). The bequests, not found in any of the texts admitted to Child's canon, appear in LL, Ord, texts from Oxfordshire, Somerset, and Newfoundland, but infrequently in the United States and not at all in Missouri. The taunt about leaving her out in the drinking of healths, found in Child A, Ord, and a Hampshire text, is almost unfailing in American copies; and so is the rose and briar ending, which does not appear in the Child versions. On the whole, however, the texts recently recorded are so much alike that it does not seem necessary to reproduce here all the copies in the Missouri collection. six of them were printed in JAFL XIX.
M. 'Barbara Allen.' Sent to me in 1916 by Mrs. Case, with the tune, as known to her in her childhood in Harrison County. No mention of the season, or of a drinking of healths. I give the tune as she sent it. It might be mentioned that Sharp once told me he had taken down the tune of this ballad twenty-seven times and that it was always in 5-time.
In Lexington where I was born.
There was a young man dwelling
He was taken sick and very sick,
For the love of Barbara Allen,
For the love of Barbara Allen.