Famous Flower- Delorme (NY-VT) c1877 Flanders C
[Abbreviated title, not local. From Ancient Ballads III, 1963 by Flanders. Notes by Coffin/Flanders follow. The title itself makes this version suspicious (since it is a print title, not a local title) and if the ballad was sung why isn't there music- after all Olney (Flanders music transcriber) and Porter collected it. I've always sensed that Delorme also used print versions, there's no indication given by Flanders that it is taken directly from print.
R. Matteson 2015]
The Famous Flower of Servingmen
(Child 106)
The tradition of "The Famous Flower of Servingmen" has died out in England. It is still known in the northeastern United States but not to the rest of the country. Its New England survival can probably be laid to its inclusion in The Blackbird Songster (New York, c. 1845) and its circulation about the region in other printed forms, such as the one in The Charms of Melody. All five texts given below and the two in Phillips Barry's British Ballads from Maine, 227 (the entire recovered American canon), are from print or close to it.
On page 280 of British Ballads from Maine one will find a reprint of The Blackbird, songster text, which Barry feels the printer must have taken from oral tradition. It is related to the fragment sent to Percy in 1776 by the Dean of Derry (See Child, II, 429). In it the stepmother rather than the mother is the villain, and most of the analogous stanzas are markedly different in phrasing and even detail. The text Barry got from the Irish woman in Brunswick and the Flanders B-D2 series below are somewhat closer than this to the Derry fragment. Although all of these also blame a step-mother rather than a true mother, Barry's text and Flanders B include the sweet William pseudonym, and Flanders C, D1, and D2 have at least a single exactly corresponding stanza. One is safe in saying that the Derry fragment, the Songster text, and the five pieces recovered from Northeastern oral tradition are of the same general sort. However, Flanders A, the version from print, is close to Child's full text, a seventeenth-century broadside in which the heroine is Elise and not Ellen or Eleanor. The Charms of Melody text is somewhat longer than the Child broadside, thirty-four stanzas against twenty-eight, but the similarities are striking line after line. See also Greig and Keith, 85-86.
C. The Famous Flower and Her Serving Man. As sung by Mrs. Lily M. Delorme of Cadyville, New York. Mrs. Delorme was born in Schuyler Falls, New York in 1869. Her father was born in Starksboro, Vermont; her mother in Shuyler Falls, New York. This ballad was learned in her home as a child. M. Olney, Marjorie Porter, Collectors; December 8, 1941.
"My father was a worthy knight,
My stepmother was a lady bright,
And I, myself, was a gay ladee,
But now I act as some servant boy.
"My father chose me a worthy knight,
My stepmother owed me an awful spite
And sent some robbers all in the night
To rob my bower and to slay my knight.
" 'Twas all alone my love they killed,
And all alone they left him still,
And all they left for to wind him in
Was the bloody sheet where my love was slain.
"It was all alone my love they killed,
And all alone they left him still;
Christ was praised and I was Plur . . .
And we lay cold clay on my love's heart."
Then she dressed herself in a suit of man's clothes
And rode till she came to the king's high gate,
And there did loudly call for work.
She gave the porter a gay gold ring,
To carry a message to the King;
"And the King he came to see what I could do
And he said he'd hire me for a day or so.
" 'Tis I can be your kitchen cook,
Or I can be your table's groom,
Or I can be your waiter on all your houses
And wait on nobles whene'er they come."
"No, you shan't be my kitchen cook,
Nor you shan't be my table's groom,
But you shall be a taster on all my wines,
And wait on nobles whene'er they dine."
As the King was riding by one day,
"What news, what news, what news," cried he.
"Good news, good news, good news," cried they:
"Your servant boy is a gay ladee."
"Oh, bring me down a suit of white silk;
I'll dress my love out as white as milk;
I'll deck her out with the navy band
And make her queen over all my land."