Careless Love- (TX) pre1950 Abernethy
[No informant named or date given, from Abernethy, Singin' Texas p. 43-44 Texas Folklore Society Publications, 1950. His notes are at the bottom of this page.
R. Matteson 2017]
Careless Love
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Can't you see what careless love can do.
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Love, oh love, how can it be,
To love a man that don't love me.
When I wore my apron low,
You'd follow me through sleet and snow.
Now I wear my apron high,
You see me and you walk on by.
Mama, Mama, there he goes,
Brand new Ford and a suit of clothes.
I cried last night and the night before
I'm gonna cry tonight, then cry no more.
Go dig my grave with a silver spade,
And let me down with a golden chain.
Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Can't you see what careless love has done.
* * * *
"Careless Love" is a white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant blues that started somewhere in the southern highlands in the last century and saturated the South and Southwest. This song or some mountain song like it was a part of the beginning of the blues.
The Negro took the sixteen-bar form from the white camp-meeting spiritual, and by injecting African beats, cries, and tonality developed his own song type from it. In the mid-nineteenth century the blues were a means of individual expression and the form was very flexible, but it remained close to the simple iambic-tetrameter, sixteen-bar pattern. By the early twentieth century, around the time of the first world war, when bands began playing the blues, the present twelve-bar form was adopted. The blues pattern is still about the same as it was in "Careless Love," a repetition of the first line and then a kicker conclusion that tells how bad hard times can be.
The theme of "Careless Love" isn't new. Hamlet's Ophelia in her madness sings a folk song about careless love, and had she not drowned would probably have been wearing her apron high before many more months. As in the case with most folk songs of the Southwest, guilty love is punished in "Careless Love." The Southwest is dominated by the puritan ethic, and if a song cannot be sung frequently and sung around the house-if the proper values aren't expressed-it won't survive. This strong puritan and protestant bias is one characteristic that separates American love songs from their British ancestors. Bawdy ballads are numerous and well known among the Scots, Irish, and English folk. Consider Robert Burns' repertoire. Sex, marital and otherwise, was sung about in its humorous aspects .and as if it were the most natural association between male and female. The American puritan ethic, stronger in the Southwest than in most places, casts its gloom on songs of courtship. There is a morbidity about most American folk love songs, and guilty love ends in violence and heartbreak.