George Collins- Church (NC) c1940 Brown 4E-1
[My date. From The Frank Brown Collection of NC Folklore, Volume 4, 1950s (Hudson's notes follow).
R. Matteson 2015]
28. Lady Alice (Child 85)
Child remarks that "this little ballad ... is a sort of counterpart to 'Lord Lovel' "[Child got this info from Robert Bell]; and perhaps it is the simplicity of its sentiment that accounts for its popularity. It appears in Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England and in Miss Mason's Nursery Rhymes and Country Songs, and it is reported as traditional song in Hampshire (JFSS III 299-302), a version not belonging to any of Child's five texts though known in America. On this side of the Atlantic it seems to belong especially to the Southern states; Barry (BBM 452-3) found a sea captain who recognized Child's C version as something he had heard sailors sing but did not know himself, the two-stanza fragment reported from Wisconsin is confessedly a Kentucky memory, and the two stanzas reported from Michigan (BSSM 53), one about the turtle dove and one giving directions for burial, are merely floating items of folk lyric and do not belong especially to 'Lady Alice' (Bayard has some texts collected in Pennsylvania [JAFL LVIII 76] but does not print them). But the song is well known in the South: in Virginia (TBV 346-53, FSSH 90, SCSM 118-22), West Virginia (FSS 1 10-14, JAFL lviii 75-6), Kentucky (FSKM 8-9), Tennessee (ETWVMB 76, SharpK I 198, FSSH 89), North Carolina (SharpK I 196-9, SSSA 47, BMFSB 2-3, FSRA 33), South Carolina (SCB 142-3), Mississippi (FSM 107-11), and Arkansas (OFS 1 135-40).[1] The texts fall into three fairly distinct groups: (1) those belonging to the tradition of Child B, in which the man's mother prepares gruel for him, his lady-love is mending her coif, when she sees the funeral procession approaching she bids the six bearers set down the coffin and declares that her body shall be buried beside his, and a lily grows out of his grave and touches the lady's breast but is presently blasted by a northeast wind; (2) texts not very close to any of the Child versions, in which Collins comes home one night, is taken sick, and dies, with no mention of his mother or of water-gruel; his sweetheart Alice (Annice, Annis, Mary), sewing her silk so fine, hears of it, follows him up and follows him down (not in any of the Child versions) until she comes up with the funeral procession, bids the bearer unscrew the coffin lid that she may kiss the cold lips that "will never kiss mine," and when her mother remonstrates that "there are other young men" replies that George has her heart. In texts of this type the man never gives directions for his burial as he does in texts of the third type, and the song ends with a stanza about the lonesome dove, not about the lily and the northeast wind. This is by far the commonest form of the ballad in America.
Type (3), exemplified by the Hampshire texts and by texts from Virginia and West Virginia (but not by any texts from North Carolina), is quite different from any of the Child versions. [2] Here Collins, riding out one fine morning, sees "a fair pretty maid" ("his own true love," "his own fair Ellen," "his Eleanor dear") washing her "marble stone"; she calls him to her ("whooped and holloed," "screamed and cried") and tells him that his life will not be long. When he leaves her he rides (more often swims, for this pretty maid is a creature of the water, a water-banshee in Bayard's reconstruction of the story) home, bids his father let him in, his mother make his bed, his sister (in the Hampshire texts) bind his head; before he dies he orders that he be buried "under that marble stone that's against fair Helen's hall." When she meets the corpse she bids her maid bring "the sheet that's wove with a silver twine" (sometimes called directly the shroud) to hang over his head "as tomorrow it shall hang over mine," and kisses "his lily-white lips. For ten thousand times he has kissed mine." The news travels to London town (in the Hampshire texts; Dublin town, FSS ABE; Douglas's town, JAFL LVIII 76; simply "down," TBV A), where six pretty maids die in one night for George (or Johnny) Collins's sake. In this version it seems pretty clear that Collins's death is in some way connected with the lady — who nonetheless grieves over it. The version is represented in America by TBV A B, FSS ABE, and by Bayard's findings in West Virginia and Pennsylvania; it does not occur in the North Carolina collection.
Footnotes:
1. For Florida see FSF 291-4.
2. So much so as to prompt Barbara M. Cra'ster (JFSS iv 106-9) to suggest that the ballad is really a fairy mistress (or mermaid) story of the type of 'Clerk Colvill' (Child 42). Later (JAFL lviii 73-103) Samuel P. Bayard re-examined the whole problem in its connection with the various forms, continental as well as British, of the Clerk Colvill story and concluded that in the Johnny Collins (our type 3) form of the story the woman in it is a banshee and the ballad is the result of an Irish working over of the Clerk Colvill story (though it has not been found in Irish tradition unless we reckon the texts from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, where there was a considerable Scotch-Irish element among the early settlers, as Irish). Still later (JAFL lx 265-86) Harbison Parker canvasses Bayard's arguments and tries to show that the woman in the case is not a banshee but a mermaid and that the elves of the Scandinavian form of the story were changed into mermaids in Shetland and Orkney tradition, which knows mermaids and selkies but not elves — though he can allege no versions of the ballad from the Shetlands or the Orkneys.
E(I) 'George Collins.' Sung by Mrs. J. Church. Recorded, but no date or place given. The basic melodic relationship to 28E(2) can readily be seen.
For melodic relationship cf. *SCSM 394, version E, measures 2 and 6 ; FSF 291, No. 162, measure i ; ibid. 292, No. 162B, measure 2. Scale: Hexatonic (3), plagal. Tonal Center: f. Structure: abac (2,2,2,2) = aa1 (4,4).