Butcher Boy - Alice Robie (NH) 1943 Flanders
[From D37805, a digitized archival cassette in the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection at Middlebury College Special Collections & Archives. https://archive.org/details/HHFBC_tapes_D37B
R. Matteson 2017]
Butcher Boy - voice performance by Alice Robie at Pittsburg, New Hampshire. Classification #: LAP24. Dated 07-19-1943.
In Dublin City there did dwell,
A butcher boy I loved so well,
He courted me my life away
And then no longer with me stayed.
There is a house in yonder town,
Where he will go and there sit down,
He'll take a strange girl on his knee,
And he'll tell to her what he once told me.
And I can tell you the reason why,
It's because she has more gold than I
But gold will melt and silver fly,
And constant love will never die.
This girl went upstairs he bed to make,
And not a single word to her mother said,
He mother came running up the stairs,
Inquiring what is the trouble with my daughter dear.
Oh mother dear if you only knew,
The pain and grief and sorrow too,
You'll take a chair and you'll sit her down,
With a pen and ink you will write it down.
Her father came home that very night
Inquiring for his heart's delight,
He went upstairs and the door he broke,
And he found her hanging to a rope.
He took his knife and he cut her down,
And on her breasts these words he found,
Oh what a foolish girl was I,
To hang myself for a butcher boy.
Now dig my brave both wide and deep,
Place a marble stone at my head and feet,
And on my breast place a turtle dove,
To show the world[1] that I died for love.
1. tape ends