Butcher Boy- Paul Lorette (VT) 1931 Flanders REC
[From: Box 2, Cylinder 15 of the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection at Middlebury College Special Collections & Archives, digitized from the original phonograph cylinder using IRENE optical scanning.
Listen: https://archive.org/details/hhfbc-cyl15
R. Matteson 2017]
Butcher Boy - sung by Paul Lorette of Manchester Center, VT, 1931; collected by Flanders, Helen Hartness, 1890-1972. This is my quick incomplete transcription of the poor quality recording.
1. In Jersey Town where I did dwell
A butcher boy I loved so well
He courted me, my heart away
And now with me he will not stay.
2. There is an inn in our town
Where my love goes and sets him down
He takes a strange girl on his knee
And tells to her what he won't tell me.
3. A grief, a grief I'll tell you why,
Because she has more gold than I
Her gold will melt her silver will fly,
Till she will be, as poor as I.
Then she went upstairs to go to bed,
And not a word to mother said
Oh mother[1] mother you do not know,
What grief and pain and sorrow, woe.
[hard to understand stanza missing here]
When her father came in at noon
Inquiring for his daughter where has she been
He went upstairs and the door he broke
He found her hanging to a rope.
He took his knife and cut her down,
And in her bosom these words he found
What a foolish girl I was then,
To hang myself for the butcher's boy.
[Why must I go bound while he goes free[2],
Why must I love a boy who don't love me
Oh no, oh no that can never be,]
Till an apple grows on an orange tree.
Oh make my grave both wide and deep
Lay a marble stone at my head and feet
And on my breast, a turtle dove,
To show this world, I died for love.
There is a bird up in a tree,
Some said he's blind and cannot see,
I wish to the Lord it was the same with me,
Before I fell into bad company.
1. I think he sings, "daughter" which makes no sense.
2. hard to understand