Dear Son- Robbins (NC) c.1921 Brown B
[From Brown Collection of NC, 1952; one of four versions from Vol. 2 and Vol. 4. Brown editors' notes follow. Miss Jewell Robbins, Pekin, Montgomery county was an active contributor to the Brown Collection in the early 1920s. She learned this song from her grandmother, Mrs. Belinda Morton, born in Moore county of English parents.
R. Matteson 2012, 2014]
7. Edward (Child 13)
Although 'Edward' in the version from which it is named stands at or near the head of English balladry in beauty and power, it is neither very old — Percy's print of 1765 is the earliest record of it — nor very frequent in tradition — Child knew but two versions and a fragment — nor, apart from the Percy and Motherwell versions, a very notable ballad. Percy had his version. Child's B, from Sir David Dalrymple; and the skill and dramatic power of its structure, especially its revelation of the whole meaning of the story in the final stanza, has occasioned doubt of its being really a "popular," i.e., a folk ballad, at least in this version.* The only record of it in modern England is in the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society iii (1938) 205-6, where Miss A. G.
[* Professor Archer Taylor, Edward mid Sven i Rosengaard (University of Chicago Press, 1931), has analyzed all the versions — English, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and American — and concludes that the Percy-Dalrymple form is not the original form, though he thinks that the ballad originated in Britain and traveled to Scandinavia. Later, Professor Bertrand H. Bronson (SFLQ iv [1940] 1-13 and 159-61 ) argues with considerable force that the Percy version is a form of conscious art, especially in its climax, where it is revealed that the murder was devised by the mother. To these it might be added that in no other version is it the father that has been killed; commonly it is a brother, and frequently on no other provocation than his having cut down a bush. The Scandinavian texts are numerous but generally late; Olrik mentions a "comic" text in a manuscript of the 1640's and a parody of it printed as a broadside in 1794, but the other Scandinavian texts were taken down in the nineteenth century.]
Gilchrist gives a seven-stanza text as sung in a Cheshire "Soul-Caking," that is, the Cheshire form of the St. George mumming. In this country it has been found in Virginia (TBV 120-9, SharpK I 50-2, SCSM 183-4), Tennessee (SharpK i 47-8), North Carolina (SharpK 1 46-7, 49, 53), South Carolina (SCSM 181-2), Florida (FSF 248-50), Mississippi (FSM 70-2), Texas (in a release of the University of Texas News Service dated March 24 [1941?]), the Ozarks (OMF 207-8, OFS i 124-6), Ohio (BSD 23-4), and California (CFLQ V 310-11 ). Most of the texts, both from the English-speaking and from the Scandinavian countries, end with a series of bequests, a feature which this ballad shares with 'Lord Randal,' 'The Two Brothers,' and 'Lizzie Wan.' Many texts, the Scandinavian especially, have various ways of saying "never" when the son is asked when he will return from exile — or death.
B. 'Dear Son.' Contributed by Miss Jewell Robbins (later Mrs. C. P. Perdue) of Pekin, Montgomery county, some time before 1925, from her manuscript collection of songs.
1 'Dear son, dear son, come tell to me,
What did you kill your brother for?'
'He cutted down that hazel-nut bush
That once would 'a' made a tree.'
2 'Dear son, dear son, come tell to me,
What will you do with your children three?'
'I'm going to leave them to bear you company
Till I sail over the sea.'
3 'Dear son, dear son, come tell to me,
What will you do with your wife?'
'I'm going to take her on yonders big ship
To bear me company.'
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Music from Vol. 4:
'Dear Son.' Contributed by Miss Jewell Robbins (later Mrs. C P. Perdue) now of Gastonia. She learned this song from her grandmother, Mrs. Belinda Morton, born in Moore county of English parents.
[music upcoming]
For melodic relationship cf. *SharpK i 49, No. 8B, measures 1-4.
Scale: Hexatonic (4). Tonal Center: b-flat. Structure: mm1n (2,2,4) = bar form. Observe how the main melodic element of measures 5-6 is combined to form the penultimate measure.