Blue-Eyed Boy: Abrams (NC) c.1940 Brown A
[My date. Brown Collection Volume III, 1953. A Brown editor's notes follow. Abrams became an active collector when he started making his recordings about 1939.
R. Matteson 2017]
257. The Blue-Eyed Boy
One of those Protean folk-lyrics whose identity is hard to fix because they shift from text to text, taking on new elements and dropping old ones from the general reservoir of the folk fancy. What may however fairly be called forms of this song have been found in North Carolina '( BMFSB 50-1 ), Arkansas (OFS iv 262), Missouri (BSM 478-80. OFS iv 261), Indiana (BSI 339), and Nebraska (ABS 212-13). The two texts in our collection illustrate its instability.
A. 'Blue-Eyed Boy.' Communicated by W. Amos Abrams of Boone, Watauga county. Not dated. The second quatrain is in his copy marked "chorus," but one suspects that it is really the first quatrain that serves that function.
1 Oh, bring me back my blue eyed boy.
Oh, bring my true love back to me.
Oh, bring me back my blue eyed boy
And forever happy will I be.
2 Must I go bound while he goes free?
Or must I act the childish part?
Must I love a man that don't love me
And marry the man that broke my heart?
3 There is a ring that has no end,
It is hard to find a faithful friend.
But when you find one good and true
Change not the old one for the new.
4 There is a tree I love to pass
That sheds its leaves as green as grass;
But none so green as love is true.
Change not the old love for the new.
5 Some say that courting is pleasure;
But oh, what pleasure do I see?
For the boy I love most dearly
Has now forsaken me.