Barbara Allen- Gillespie (MS) pre-1936 Hudson N
[Single stanza excerpt provided from Arthur Palmer Hudson's Folksongs of Mississippi, 1936. Hudson's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2015]
BONNY BARBARA ALLEN
(Child, No. 84)
As is the case in other Southern states the balladry of which has been extensively gleaned, so in Mississippi this is the best known of the traditional English and Scottish ballads. The Mississippi collection made under my direction contains sixteen texts, and the number might easily have been doubled. All these are fairly complete; each has some distinctive feature or features.
Since the number of texts is so large, it is deemed permissible to omit from some of them stanzas practically identical with those given in full length texts and to reproduce only those stanzas of some texts that have interesting or significant variant details.
N. Barbara Allen. Copy from Miss Emma Ruth Corban, Fayette; communicated by Miss Loreni Gillespie, Vardaman, Calhoun County. Thirteen stanzas. Like the other Mississippi variants of the Child B text, except for Barbara's command to her mother, in the tenth stanza, to dig her grave. In one Mississippi text, J, above (that of Mr. Swetnam, which came from Kentucky), the mother is asked to make the bed-"Make it long and narrow"-and the father is asked to dig the grave-"Go dig it deep and narrow"- but in none of them, or in any other American variants that I have seen, is the mother asked to dig the grave. The stanza contain the request follows:
10. The more she looked, the more she moaned,
And burst out into crying,
"Go Mamma, go Mamma, and dig my grave,
And dig it deep and narrow."