Bluegrass Messengers

Captain Ward- Crampton (MI) 1916 Gardner

[From: Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan; Emelyn-Elizabeth Gardner and Geraldine Jencks Chickering, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press: 1939.

This abbreviated version is based on or similar to the Forget-Me-Not-Songster versions. 

R. Matteson 2014]

83 CAPTAIN WARD
(Captain Ward and the Rainbow, Child, No. 287)

This text is a hybrid harking back, according to Child (V, 143-145), to an early seventeenth-century English broadside concerning a bold pirate of the period. Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, pp. 347-363, print five versions, with a scholarly discussion and references. For additional references and texts see Flanders and Brown, pp. 242-044; Kittredge, JAFL, XXX, 332; and Shoemaker, pp. 300-301.

The present version was sung in 1916 by Mrs. Emehne Jenks Crampton, St. Clair; she had acquired the song from hearing it sung by her English husband, who had learned it from his father.

1    Come all ye jolly sailors bold
Who live by fife or drum,
I'll tell you of a rank robber
Who now on the sea is come.

2   His name, they say, is Captain Ward,
As you the truth shall hear.
There never was such a robber
This hundred and fifty year.

3   The king sent out a gallant ship,
The Rainbow was her name,
To scour the seas for Captain Ward
And bring to him the same.

4   He sailed east, he sailed west,
But nothing could he spy,
Until he came to the very spot
Where Captain Ward did die.

5   They fought from eight o'clock in the morning
Till eight o'clock at night;
At length the gallant Rainbow
Began to take her flight.

6   "Go home, go home," said Captain Ward,
"And tell your king from me,
If he reigns king upon the land,
I'll reign king upon the sea."