John of the Hazelgreen- Fitzgerald (VA) 1918 Sharp
[From English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians I ; 1932 edition; Sharp and Karpeles.
One area (although it was found in other locations) of Virginia became the repository for a version of this ballad. At the time Traditional Ballads was being completed (c.1928) there were no other versions of John of Hazelgreen collected in the US (that would change as Barry published a version from Maine in 1929).
George Foss, who wrote an excellent article titled, From White Hall to Bacon Hollow, collected an excellent version in 1961 from Robert Shiflett, who was Raz Shiflett's son (see also Davis H; collected from Raz). Here are some excerpts:
From White Hall to Bacon Hollow is about a place and about its culture and people. I have granted myself the author's indulgence of selecting a title significant in its double meaning. White Hall to Bacon Hollow is a stretch of twisting country road, Virginia route 810, crossing the line between Albemarle and Greene Counties.
The earliest settlers of importance to the area were members of the Brown family. The patriarch of the Virginia Browns was Benjamin Brown, who began acquiring land in Albemarle County in 1747. He amassed six thousand acres of what was to become known as Brown's Cove. Included in these holdings was a tract patented to him by King George III in 1750.
It is of importance at this point to mention Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., who was a collector of ballads and folksongs specifically of Virginia. He was not a collector in the same sense as Sharp, that is a field worker and face-to-face gatherer of songs. He was more in the mold of Francis James Child, the great collector-editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, that is, he served to gather and organize, to sift and evaluate the field work of numerous amateur, hobbyist and professional collectors. As early as 1929 he produced Traditional Ballads of Virginia; in 1949 he published Folksongs of Virginia and More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, all three under the auspices of the Virginia Folklore Society. A courtly gentleman “of the old school,” he was professor of English literature at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a great span of time. It was professor Davis who was Paul Clayton Worthington's teacher at the University during the 1950's and inspired Paul's interest in balladry and folksong.
Two later collectors who visited and worked in the White Hall-Bacon Hollow area were Richard Chase and professor Winston Wilkinson whose manuscripts are now kept by the University of Virginia. They were the first collectors to record the songs of some of the finest singers in the region, Ella Shiflett and Victoria Shiflett Morris as early as 1935.
Some of the family names still found in northwest Albemarle County and Greene County date from pre-Revolutionary times: Brown, Frazier and Jones. Other names commonly found are Walton, Powell, Sandridge and Wood. But by far the most commonly found are Morris and Shiflett. This makes the tracing of relationships very difficult since various branches of the family are only very distantly related but share the same name. Robert Shiflett (designated “Raz's Robert,” i.e. Erasmus' son Robert, to distinguish him from the region's numerous other Robert Shifletts) speculates that the family was originally descended from French mercenaries brought over by Lafayette to aid the colonies in their War of Independence.
Beginning in the early 20th century the area was visited by a series of folksong collectors. The first was Cecil Sharp, who, assisted by Miss Maud Karpeles, made collecting trips into the mountains in the summer months of 1916, 1917, and 1918. These efforts resulted in 1932 in the publication of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians -- a book that has served as an invaluable reference and a model for some folklorists. According to this journals, Sharp visited the White Hall-Bacon Hollow area from September 20th to 28th in 1916. He lists this segment of his travels as being from Charlottesville to Brown's Cove and resulting in the collection of forty-two songs. The relatively low yield of material in so rich an area must be laid to the slow modes of transportation (Mr. Sharp and Miss Karpeles went from farm to farm mostly on mule back) and the laborious process of transcribing texts and tunes by hand during countless repetitions of a song. Working at that rate, Mr. Sharp could have fruitfully spent a dozen years in the White Hall-Bacon Hollow region alone. Instead he and Miss Karpeles spent 46 weeks, visited 5 states (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia), heard 281 singers, and collected 1,612 tunes representing some 500 different songs and ballads. It is easy to understand his activities when we read in his own words of his wonder and surprise at finding such a rich and untapped store of a commodity which he feared was nearing extinction in his native England.
My title. Compare to Davis, Versions A-I. Below are the notes of Sharp.
R. Matteson 2014]
No. 43. John of Hazelgreen.
Texts without tunes:—Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, No. 293. Ford's Song Histories, p. 282. Gavin Greig's Last Leaves, No, 106.
Texts with tunes :—Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, pp. 199 and 206. Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs, p. 124. British Ballads from Maine, p. 369. Davis's Traditional Ballads of Virginia, pp. 529 and 604.
[John of the Hazelgreen]- Sung by Mr. LLOYD FITZGERALD at Nash, Va., May 9, 1918; Pentatonic. Mode 3.
1. While riding down that greenwood road
There sat a lady who mourned,
And all of her lamentation was,
It was John of the Hazelgreen.
2 You are welcome home with me, kind Miss,
You are welcome home, said he,
And you may have my oldest son
A husband for to be,
And you may have my oldest son
A husband for to be. [1]
3 O I don't want your oldest son,
He's neither lord nor king.
I intend to be the bride of none
But John of the Hazelgreen.
4 For he's tall and his shoulders broad,
He's the lord of all our kin,
His hair hangs down like the links of gold,
He's John of the Hazelgreen.
5 While riding down that lengthy lane,
That lane that leads to town,
O up stepped John of the Hazelgreen
And holped [2] his lady down.
6 Forty times he kissed her ruby lips,
And forty times he kissed her chin,
And forty times he kissed her ruby lips
And let (or led) his lady in.
1. Sharp has bis (to repeat) on the last two lines.
2. helped, see also Davis H where its hope (probably sung holp), apparently the "o" is used in place of an "eh" sound.