Barbara Allen- Colvord (NC) 1919 Brown AA
[Partial text. From the Brown Collection; Volume 2, 1952. Some texts have music from Vol. 4 added. There are also several additional texts in Vol. 4. The Brown editors' notes follow.
The music was apparently lost (see notes below: "The air accompanying this text was furnished by C. E. Buckner, Jr., of Asheville. . . "
R. Matteson 2015]
27. Bonny Barbara Allan (Child 84)
Of all the ballads in the Child collection this is easily the most widely known and sung, both in the old country and in America. Scarcely a single regional gathering of ballads but has it, and it has been published in unnumbered popular songbooks. See BSM 60-1. Mrs. Eckstorm in a letter written in 1940 informed me that she and Barry had satisfied themselves, before Barry's death, that as sung by Mrs. Knipp to the delight of Samuel Pepys in 1666 it was not a stage song at all but a libel on Barbara Villiers and her relations with Charles II; but so far as I know the details of their argument have never been published. The numerous texts in the North Carolina collection may conveniently be grouped according to the setting in three divisions: (1) those that begin in the first person of Barbara's lover (or at least of the narrator), (2) those that begin with a springtime setting, and (3) those that begin with an autumnal setting. Of course those in group 1 may also have either the springtime or the autumnal setting. The rose-and-brier ending is likely to be attached to any of the texts. The lover's bequests to Barbara, a feature not infrequent in modern British versions but unusual in America, appears once in the North Carolina texts, in F. The first person of the lover commonly is dropped after the opening stanza, but in F it holds through four stanzas. Not all of the texts are given in full.
AA. 'Barbra Allen.' Collected by C. B. Houck of Todd, Ashe county, apparently from Maude S. Colvord of Jefferson in the same county, December 30, 1919. The air accompanying this text was furnished by C. E. Buckner, Jr., of Asheville, who knew it from his mother, who had learned it in Madison county. It is substantially the same text as Z but shows some minor variations. Line 3 of stanza 2 runs:
Saying, 'Rise you up for your true love calls.'
Stanzas 4 and 7 of Z are combined:
'I am low, I am low, I know indeed,
And death is in me dwelling.'
'No better will you ever be
By getting Barbra Allen.'
William defends himself against the charge of slighting Barbra at the drinking instead of meekly acknowledging it as he does in Z. In stanza 1D it has the more customary "corpse" where Z has "coffin." It omits stanza 11 of Z, and the last four stanzas are differently arranged:
*Oh, papa, go and dig my grave,
Go dig it deep and narrow;
My true love died for me today,
I will die for him tomorrow.
*Oh, mama, go and make my bed,
Go make it soft and narrow ;
Sweet William died for me today
And I must die for him tomorrow.'
They took him to the new church yard
And there they buried him.
They placed his true love by his side —
Her name was Barbra Allen.
And out of his grave there grew a rose.
And out of hers a brier;
They grew till they tied into a true love knot,
The rose around the brier.