Her Babes- Rathbone (NC) 1918 Sharp Q
[My title, replacing the generic Child title. Single stanza with music from Cecil Sharp; English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians; Sharp/Campbell I, 1917; also Sharp/Karpeles I; 1932. The 1932 Edition notes follow.
R. Matteson 2015]
No. 22. The Wife of Usher's Well.
Texts without tunes:—Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, No. 79. Journal of American Folk-Lore, xiii. 119; xxiii. 429; xxx. 305; xxxix. 96. Cox's Folk Songs of the South, p. 88.
Texts with tunes:—E. M. Leather's Folk-Lore of Herefordshire, p. 198. Davis's Traditional Ballads of Virginia, pp. 278 and 576.
See also The Cruel Mother (No. 10), Tune B. McGill's Folk Songs of the Kentucky Mountains, p. 5. Texts A and B are remarkable in that the children cite the mother's 'proud heart' as the reason that has caused them to 'lie in the cold clay', a motive which is absent from other English and Scottish versions.
Q. [Her Babes] Sung by Mr. SAM RATHBONE at Shoal Creek, Burnsville, N. C, Oct. 4, 1918
(No 2nd or 6th.)
They hadn't been gone but a very short time,
Scarcely six weeks and three days,
Till sickness came in that old town
And swept her babes away.