Butcher's Boy- Nellie Haddix (WV) 1917 Cox A
[From John Harrington Cox, Folk Songs of the South, 1925. His notes follow. Cox's notes follow. Cox's notes are not accurate since he didn't know all the underlying broadsides. His attribution of Sweet William and Sheffield Park as sources are wrong (although there are some shared stanzas) and "Squire's Daughter" is a poor source for suicide stanzas.
This version dates back well into the 1800s and is similar to, or based on, the 1860s print versions.
R. Matteson 2017]
THE BUTCHER BOY
Three variants have been found in West Virginia, none of them perfect. Jersey City, New York City, and London City claim in turn this famous butcher boy. "The Butcher Boy" is made up of modified extracts from (1) "Sheffield Park";[1] (2) "The Squire's Daughter"[2] (called also "The Cruel Father, or, Deceived Maid"[3] ); (3) "A Brisk Young Sailor" (or its abbreviated version, "There is an alehouse in yonder town"[4]); and (4) "Sweet William" ("The Sailor Boy"[5]). To (1) it owes stanzas 1 and 4; to (2), stanzas 6 and 7; 1 and 2 to (3), stanzas 2, 3, and 8; to (4), stanza 5. For American texts and for references, British and American, see Journal, xxix, 169; xxxi, 73; xxxv, 360; Pound, No. 24; Lomax, p. 397 ("Rambling Boy"); Minish MS., 111, 49.
A. "The Butcher's Boy." Communicated by Miss Sallie Evans, Elkins, Randolph County, 1917; obtained from Miss Nellie Haddix, who got it from her mother, who learned it from her parents. The words in brackets I have inserted from the De Marsan broadside.
1 In Jersey City, where I did dwell,
A butcher's boy I loved so well,
He courted me my life away,
And then with me he would not stay.
2 [There is an inn] in this same town,
Where my love goes and sits him down,
Takes a strange girl on his knee,
And tells her what he would not me.
3 It's a grief to me, I'll tell you why,
Because she has more gold than I;
But her gold will melt and her silver fly,
In time to come she will be poorer than I.
4 She goes upstairs to make her bed,
Nothing to her mother said;
Her mother comes up saying,
"What is the matter, dear daughter dear?"
"O mother, mother, you do not know,
The grief and pain and sorrow and tear.
5 "So get a chair and sit me down,
Pen and ink to write it down";
On every line she drops a tear,
Whilst calling home her Willa dear.
6 Father comes home, saying, 1
"Where is daughter dear?"
He goes up stairs, the door he broke;
There he found her hanging on a rope.
7 [He took his knife and cut her down,
[And] in her breast these lines he found :
["O what a silly maid was I,
To hang myself for a butcher's boy!"]
8 "Go dig my grave both broad and deep,
Place a marble stone at my head and feet;
Upon my breast a turtle dove,
To show the world I died for love."
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1 Broadsides (Catnach; Jackson & Son, Birmingham); Gillington, Eight Hampshire Folk-Songs, p. 14.
2 Broadside (W. Shelmerdine & Co., Manchester).
3 Slip without imprint (eighteenth or early nineteenth century).
4 See p. 427. s See p. 353.
5. [missing]