Duratta, My Son- Williams (TN) c1951 Boswell B
[From Folk Songs of Middle Tennessee, Boswell, Wolfe ed., 1997. These songs were collected by George Boswell in the late 1930s, 40s and 50s and were published by the late great Charles Wolfe after Boswell died in 1995. This is a single stanza from a version collected in Nashville Tennessee, circa 1951. I assume the rest of the text is in the Boswell Collection. Wolfe's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
Lord Randall
This grim, Hitchcock like tale of poison and murder is, like so many of the old English and Scottish ballads, couched in the form of a dialogue---one which builds through hints and innuendo to the inevitable climax. Also like many of the old ballads, it starts in the middle of the story and leaves some key parts ambiguous. Why is Lord Randall poisoned, and by whom? All we know from this version is that he went to "the greenwood," met his "true love," and ate a meal of boiled eels.
In another Tennessee variant, collected by Boswell from Albert Williams, the young victim (here called Duratta) has been to see his grandmother, not his lover, and his last exchange with his mother is:
What will you leave grandmother, Duratta, my son?
What will you leave grandmother my darling one?
A rope for to hang her, Mother,
Make my bed warm,
I'm sick at heart and I want to lie down.
Though there is some evidence that this song was known in seventeenth-century Italy, perhaps the earliest known printing of it in English was in Sir Walter Scott's famous Minstrelsy of the Scorish Border (1803). Over the next fifty years, dozens of versions appeared, many in Scottish dialect, sometimes with the hero named Lord Ronald, sometimes with the name Tiranti. In his massive collection, Child labeled it number L2. By 1912 versions were being found in America, from Maine to Texas, often with the title 'Johnny Randall" or "Johnny Randolph" (see Belden, 74 tr.);apparently Cecil Sharp was the first to find the song in Tennessee, when he visited a Mrs. Maples at Bird's Creek near Sevierville in 1917 (Sharp and Karpeles, 1:43). Mildred Haun collected a version in Cocke County, and Robert Mason found one in Middle Tennessee, in Cannon County. Boswell had three versions, all in Nashville: the one from Albert Williams mentioned above; one from Stanley Hom; and this one, from Thomas J. Staton, a graduate student at George Peabody College for Teachers. Staton learned it from his mother, who was from North Georgia.