Beaulampkins- Prather (NC) 1939 Brown 4-A1
[From Brown Collection, volume 4. Their notes follow.
Title named after version A, contributed by Thomas P. Smith. Prather was Frank Proffit's great-aunt (also called his aunt) and may be the source for his version- although the Hicks family (his wife's side) also knew the ballad.
R. Matteson 2015]
29. Lamkin (Child 93)
[See music below]
This gruesome little ballad is traced no further back than the latter eighteenth century, but was widely known and sung a hunred and fifty years ago; Child has twenty-six versions of it (some of them merely fragments). And it is still not forgotten. It has been reported since Child's time from Aberdeenshire (LL 71-2), Cambridgeshire (JFSS v 83-4), Surrey (JFSS i 212-13), Hampshire (JFSS II III), and Somerset (JFSS v 81-2), and on this side of the water from Newfoundland (FSN 17), Maine (BBM 200-6, JAFL Lii 70-4), Massachusetts (FSONE 303-5), New York (JAFL XIII 117-18), Virginia (TBV 354-9). Kentucky (SharpK I 202-7), Tennessee (FSSH 91-3, BTFLS viii 75), North Carolina (JAFL xiii 118, SharpK i 201-2, SSSA 62-4, FSRA 76, SFLQ V 137-8), Arkansas (OFS i 141-2), Ohio (BSO 59-60, Indiana (BSI 122-4), and Michigan (BSSM 313). The name Lamkin (which takes in tradition a variety of forms, some of them scarcely traceable to that original) is explained by Miss Gilchrist (JEFDSS I 1-17) as a Flemish form of the name Lambert; Flemings were famous for their skill as masons and were sometimes brought to England as builders. The motivation of Lamkin's savagery, in many texts, is that he has not been paid by the lord for the building of his castle, but in many other texts no motive is offered. The daughter Betsy appears in two of Child's versions and frequently in American texts. The false nurse, with her bitter hatred of her mistress, is a persistent figure. The macabre humor of Lamkin rocking the cradle in which the baby is screaming its life away while the nurse carries on a long dialogue with the lady upstairs marks most of the Child versions and is retained in many of the American texts.
A(1) 'Beaulampkins.' Sung by Mrs. Nancy Prather. Recorded at Milam, Ashe county, August 5, 1939. Very closely related to 29A, especially in both cadences, which are alike in each one of the two songs.
For melodic relationship cf. ***SharpK i 201, 204, No. 27A, C, excepting the final cadence; ibid. 205, No. 27D, where the last two measures are identical; **FSSH 91 (same remarks as made in previous version apply here also); BMFSB 20, cadences are alike besides other similarities. Scale: Mode III, plagal. Reprisenbar. Tonal Center: a-flat. Structure: aa1ba1 (2,2,2,2) = ab (4,4).
1 Beaulampkins was as fine a mason
As ever laid stone.
He built a fine castle
And pay he got none.