Fair Willie Drowned In Yarrow- Riddle (AR) 1965
[This is essentially an extact version of, or rewrite of, Child 215C. Almeda Riddle collected and studied ballads both orally and from print and perhaps, like Aunt Molly Jackson and her Robin Hood ballads, may have obtained a translation or translated Child C. Her version was mentioned and the text given in her 1970 book, "A Singer and her Songs," which she was surely working on from the mid to late 1960s- the same time this ballad became part of her repertoire. According to Riddle, she didn't sing this song until recently but ""knew this song as a child. . ."
The telling stanza that points to using a print version is Stanza 3, third line: "You'll get a letter e'er it is e'en." It's a long way from Scotland's "Eppie Fraser, daughter of a tramp, and unable to read, circa 1840" to Heber Springs, Arkansas.
There's also the name change, from 1965 (Fair Willie) to 1970 (Banks of Yarrow) perhaps to distance the ballad from Child 215C.
R. Matteson 2013.]
Fair Willie Drowned In Yarrow- As sung by Almeda Riddle, Heber Springs, Arkansas on October 23, 1965; By 1970 when she recorded the song for John Quincy Wolfe Jr., she had changed the title to "Banks of the Yarrow."
Listen: http://maxhunter.missouristate.edu/songinformation.aspx?ID=584
VERSE 1
My Willie's rare and Willie's fair
And Willie's wonderous bonnie
My Willie has promised he'd marry with me
If he ever did marry with any.
VERSE 2
O, Sister dear, I've had this dream
And I fear it means sorrow
I dreamed I was pulling heather green
On the bonnie banks of the Yarrow.
VERSE 3
Sister dear, I'll tell your dream
An' it doth mean sorrow
You'll get a letter e'er it is e'en,
Your lovers' drowned in the Yarrow
VERSE 4
She searched for 'im up stream, searched for 'im down
With much distress an' sorrow
And found 'im where willows grew
On the bonnie banks of Yarrow.
VERSE 5
Her hair it being three quarters long
The color it was yellow
She tied it around his middle small
An' pulled 'im from the Yarrow
VERSE 6
Last night my bed was made full wide
Tonight I'll make it narrow
No man shall ever sleep by my side
Since Willie's drowned in the Yarrow.
The "Discovery" of Almeda Riddle
Background and Commentary by Daniel W. Patterson
Almeda Riddle, folklorist Roger Abrahams wrote in 1977, “is one of the luminaries of the folk festival circuit.” But the world outside her community on the southern edge of the Ozarks had never heard of her until 1952. In that year John Quincy Wolf, Jr., a college English teacher raised forty miles to the east, came collecting folksongs and recorded her. (Debora Kodish, in a feminist reading of this first encounter, describes Wolf as triumphant and deeply moved by his “discovery” of her singing and unaware that he had intruded into a day already hectic and exhausting for Almeda Riddle and her family.) Wolf mentioned her to Alan Lomax, who included cuts by her in an album of recordings he himself made with Ozark musicians. Five solo albums followed. Word of Almeda Riddle also reached the Newport Folk Festival, which booked her to perform. Roger Abrahams came to know her too, taped interviews, and edited them into A Singer and Her Songs: Almeda Riddle’s Book of Ballads (1970) and wrote additional essays. Almeda Riddle’s reputation became so firmly established that she received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1983, the second year the National Endowment for the Arts offered this honor. George West and his wife Starr Mitchell--then young folk-revival singers in Arkansas, now an award-winning high school teacher and a state public folklorist/historian, and still singers--had developed a friendship with her. Fortunately they undertook to make this video. By the early 1980s her voice had lost some of the freshness it had in her early recordings, but the film preserves glimpses of her singing and her personality, and it includes the NEA presentation. Almeda Riddle died three years later, in June 1986.