Come Along, Come Along My Pretty Little Miss- (VA) 1898 Child Supplimental
[This song appeared in 1898 The Folk-lore Journal (Great Britain) article The London Ballads by W. H. Babcock. The song also appeared in the "Additons and Corrections" volume of Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads" which was published after his death by Kittredge in 1898. It is one of many US songs associated with Child No. 76 by virtue of the two "Who will shoe your pretty little feet?" verses common in many songs/ballads. These songs do not tell the story of Lord Gregory and the Lass of Roch Royal and are not properly version of Child No. 76. Since Child J has just these two verses, many ballad scholars have categorized unrelated songs as Child No. 76 when these two verses are present.
R. Matteson 2012]
THE LONDON BALLADS
THEY come from that prosperous but out-of-the-way county of Virginia, in the corner between the Potomac and the Blue Ridge. Plain people of the conservative overseer and small-tenant class have transmitted them from mother to daughter, through the years and lives that have passed since the first settlement, as in England before it. Of course they do not think of writing them down, and know nothing of the books in which the relics of balladry are treasured.
One evening as we approached, in the dusk, our home near Washington, a ballad, then heard for the first time, came chanted to us out of the open windows. The new nurse girl, white, and from up the river, was singing the smaller children to sleep. "When the song of many words ended, another was taken up, and after it another. Plainly the services of the collector were called for, and most members of the family enlisted, as opportunity offered. Unfortunately the pace of the music kept ahead of the reporters; and when she undertook to recite the lines deliberately, something was sure to be omitted or confused. Memory depended in part on the swing and excitement of her habitual mode of utterance. But a fair approach to completeness, in some cases, was made by repetition and comparison; and the results in full were read to the young woman's mother, who made some notable additions, and declared the ballads to be substan tially correct. She could not explain anything which is not obvious, nor, indeed, tell us anything of them but what I have said in the beginning.
"Wilson" is, perhaps, the most important of the series: a near relative of "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight," whatever names may seem to say. That cycle, so carefully studied and preserved by Professor Childs, cannot afford to leave this stray member wandering uurecorded over Virginia foot hilla. It lives in the air and the ear alone, as indeed it always has from that far time when some crude singer first gave it to our ancestry. With all its imperfections, we ought to be glad to make its acquaintance in type, for we shall never greet an older friend among living things.
Come Along, Come Along My Pretty Little Miss- (VA) 1898 Child Supplimental; From The Folk-lore Journal, Volume 7 By Folklore Society (Great Britain); The London Ballads by W. H. Babcock; Note: The next has no title but its first line.
"Come along, come along, my pretty little miss,
Come along, come along," said he;
"And seat yourself by me."
"Neither will I come, and neither sit down,
For I have not a moment's time;
For I heard that yon had a new sweetheart,
And your heart is no more mine."
"It never was, and it never shall be,
And it never was any such a thing;
For yonder she stands, in her own father's garden,
The garden of the vine,
Mourning for her own true love,
Just like I've mourned for mine."
I laid my head in a little closet door,
To hear what my true love had to say,
So that I might know a little of his mind
Before he went away.
I laid my head on the side of his bed,
My arms across his breast;
I made him believe, for the fall of the year,
The sun rose in the west.
"I'm going away, I'm coming back again,
If it is ten thousand miles;
It's who will shoe your pretty little feet,
And who will glove your hand,
And who will kiss your red, rosy lips,
While I'm in a foreign land?"
"My father will shoe my pretty little feet,
My mother glove my hand,
My babe will kiss my red, rosy lips,
While you're in a foreign land."