Katie Dear- Grace McCurry (NC) 1931 Scarborough A
[Date as supplied by Bronson, indicates the approximate time the ballads or songs had been collected. From: Scarborough; "A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains" 1938, published posthumously. Her notes follow.
She mentions an Irish origin and offers no proof.
R. Matteson 2016]
AWAKE! AWAKE!
This is an Irish ballad, which fact explains its omission from Child's collection, or from the Virginia volume which limits itself to Child items. It is given by Cecil Sharp in his English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, listed as a ballad, and he notes its previous appearances in Britain (Gavin Grieg's Folk-Song of the North-East, I, arts. 54, 123; Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs, I, 225, etc.). Professor Kittredge has a note on it in the Journal of American Folk-Lore,XX,260, as a variant of a song which Allan Cunningham knew in a Nithsdale version and quotes in part in a note to "O, my luve's like a red, red rose," in his edition of Burns, 1834, IV, 285.
Sharp gives it under the title of "Arise, Arise," I, 72. Baskerville discusses it as one of a group of songs in "The Night Visit," Publications of the Modern Language Association, XXXI, 566 et seq.
Mrs. Grace McCurry, of Asheville, formerly of Worley's Deadenin', sang a naive account of the father's and mother's tragic interference with true love.
(A) Katy(sic) Dear, or Willie Darling
Oh, Katie dear, go ask your mother
If you my fair bride be,
If she says no, pray return and tell me,
So my troubles no longer will be.
Oh, Willie darling, there's not any use to,
For she's in her bed at rest,
And close by her side lies a silver dagger
To kill the boy that I love best.
Oh, Katie dear, go ask your father
If you my fair bride be.
If he says no, pray return and tell me,
So my troubles no longer will be.
Oh, Willie darling, there's not any use to,
Because he's in his study room,
And close by his side lies a silver dagger
To kill the boy that I love best.
Then he took the silver dagger
Plunged it in his cold white breast,
Goodbye, Katie, goodbye, darling,
Dying for the girl that I love best.
Then she took the silver dagger
Plunged it in her lily-white breast,
Goodbye, papa, goodbye, mama,
Dying with the boy that I love best.