Barbara Allen- Roberts (NC) pre1931 Scarborough F
[Dorothy Scarborough, A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains, 1937. All version are pre-1936, the year Scarborough died. Bronson dates her ballads, c. 1931. Her notes follow.
No indication was made about the date, I've used Bronson's default date.
R. Matteson 2015]
BONNY BARBARA ALLEN
(Child No. 84)
Of all the ballads brought over from Britain and handed down by oral transmission in America, none is more popular than "Barbara Allen." Pepys has recorded his delight in hearing Mrs. Knipp, an actress, sing it in 1666. "In perfect pleasure I was to hear her sing, and especially her little Scotch song of Barbary Allen." Goldsmith wrote that he was moved by it- "The music of the finest singers is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairy-maid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good-night, or The cruelty of Barbara Allen!" It is preserved in Percy's Reliques and in many another collection, and Arthur Kyle Davis reports ninety-two items of it from Virginia, some of them fragmentary and repetitious, with a dozen melodies, none of them identical with others, though similar to them.
In general, the tune is found in many variants, the details are different, but the tragedy of love and death remains the same in its essentials and (when the right singer sings it) has power to touch the heart now as three centuries ago. The name of the luckless lover varies, but that of Barbara Allen remains constant, save for spelling. Albert J. Beveridge says that this was one of the songs sung by Abraham Lincoln as a boy in Indiana.
* * * *
Mrs. Stella Roberts, of Fletcher, North Carolina, gave me the song that her grandmother, long since dead, had sung. It adds
several interesting details, such as the name of the town, the fact that there were three fair maids, instead of merely one, as most versions have it, and that " the old woman," presumably Barbara's mother, was an added casualty and was buried on Easter Monday.
Mrs. Roberts said that a friend of hers who used to sing "Barbara Allen, " used the name of Lord Graham instead of Sweet William.
(F) BARBARA ALLEN. Mrs. Stella Roberts, of Fletcher, North Carolina, learned from her grandmother.
Honor, Honor was the town
Where three fair maids were dwelling;
There was but one that I called my own,
And that was Barbara Allen.
'Twas in the merry month of May
When all tree buds were swelling
Sweet William to this country came
A-courting Barbara Allen.
He sent his servant to her door,
He sent him to her dwelling,
My master's sick and very sick,
And for your sake he's dying.
He stretched out his lily white hands
A-hoping for to touch her,
She drew the curtain to one side,
And said, young man, you're dying.
Sweet William died on Saturday night
And Barbara died on Sunday.
The old woman died for love of both,
She died on Easter Monday.
Oh, Mother, mother, make my bed,
Make it long and narrow.
Sweet William died for me tonight,
I'll die for him tomorrow.
They buried him deep in the old church-yard
They buried her beside him;
There grew a rose bush on one's grave,
And a brier on the other.
They grew as high as the old church tower
And could not grow any higher,
They looped and tied in a true love's knot
For all true love to admire.