Cambric Shirt- McKay (MO) c1901 Belden B
[My title. From Ballads and Songs collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society; Belden, 1940. Belden's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
The Elfin Knight
(Child 2)
Of the riddle ballads admitted to Child's collection this appears to be the best remembered both in the old world and in the New. It has been recorded from Aberdeenshire (LL 1-2) and frorn Ireland. (OIFMS No. 117, JFSS III 12-3); from Yorkshire (ECS 12-3), Northumberland, (ECS 6-7), Sussex (JFSS I 83), Wiltshire (JFSS II 2I2, III 274-5, FSUT 221-2), and Somerset (FSSom No. 64) ; from Maine (JAFL XXX 284-5, with an excellent bibliographical note by Kittredge; BBM 3-11), Vermont (VFSB 194-6, GGMS 58-9), Massachusetts (JAFL VII 228-9, XVIII 49-50, 212, 213-4), Rhode Island (JAFL XVIII 50-1, 218), Pennsylvania (NPM 129), Kentucky (SharpK I1), North Carolina (SharpK I 2), Georgia (JAFL XIII 120-2), Texas (JAFL XXVI 174-5, PFLST x 137-8), Illinois (FSSH 31, by way of Missouri), Nebraska (Pound, syllabus), and California (JAFL XIX 130-1). Barry (see JAFL xxx 284) found that it was printed in an American songbook about 1844 and as a Boston broadside a few years earlier. It has two types of refrain, represented respectively by the first and the second of the Missouri texts (the third Missouri text is really from Vermont). The 'rosemary and thyme' form is properly an intercalated refrain, constituting the second, and fourth lines of the stanza; but in Missouri it has been put together and reduced. The other refrain is also of the intercalated sort, but consists of nonsense syllables. As Child remarked, the elf is an interloper, and he has entirely disappeared from modern versions.
B. No title. [Cambric Shirt] From Mrs. E. A. McKay, January, 1921; from her husband, who learned it some twenty years earlier from a wandering hired man at his father's farm in Knox County.
Are you a-going to London, sir?
Fum a lum la castle ony
Just give my love to a little girl there
Tum a keetle o keetle o taly a temple a tum a lum a la castle ony
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Without a needle or needler's work.
Tell her to wash it in yonders well,
'Where water never was, nor rain never fell.
Tell her to hang it on yonders line,
'Where darkness never was nor the sun never shines.
[She]
Are you a-going to Boston, sir?
Just give my respects to an old man there.
Tell him to deed me an acre of land
Between salt water and sea sand.
Tell him to plow it with a sheep's horn
And seed it down with three grains of corn.
Tell him to reap it with a pen knife
And haul it in with a single span of mice.
Tell him to put it in yonder barn,
That never was built since Adam was born.
Tell him to build me a ship of brick,
And come sailing over the deep.
Tell the old fool, when he's done this work,
To bring me the land and I'll give him the shirt.