Cruel Ship's Carpenter- Freeman (NC) 1918 Sharp U
[Single stanza with music from English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians; Volume I; 1917 and 1932. Collected by Cecil J. Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. Edited by Maud Karpeles. Additional text from Sharp's MS. The 1932 notes follow.
This is unique opening stanza for the ballad and found only in another version, Sharp E. Unfortunately the complete text was never taken down for either. From the next two stanzas (Sharp's MS) we see it goes into the standard US text.
R. Matteson 2016]
No. 49. The Cruel Ship's Carpenter (1932 notes)
Texts without tunes:—Broadsides by Pitts, Jackson & Son, and Bloomer (Birmingham). Ashton's A Century of Ballads, p. 101.
Texts with tunes :—Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs, ii. 99. Journal of the Folk-Song Society, i. 172. Folk Songs from Somerset, No. 83 (published also in English Folk Songs, Selected Edition, i. 4, and One Hundred English Folk-Songs, p. 4). Cox's Folk Songs of the South , pp. 308 (see also further references) and 528. Wyman and Brockway's Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs, p. 110, and Lonesome Tunes, p. 79. Journal of American Folk-Lore, xx. 262.
U. The Cruel Ship's Carpenter - Sung by Mr. K. FREEMAN at Marion, N. C, Sept. 3, 1918. Pentatonic. Mode 2.
There lived a mason who lived by trade,
He had for his daughter a beautiful maid,
For wit and for beauty there was none to compare,
For her old sweet-heart was ship's carpenter.
One morning so early just at the break of day,
He come to her window to call her away,
Saying: "Rise up Pretty Polly and go away with me,
Before we can wed, love, some friends well go see.