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Knoxville Girl [Laws P35]
ARTIST: From the Louvin Brothers- Tragic Songs of Life, Rounder SS012, LP (199?), cut#B.04;
CATEGORY: Fiddle and Instrumental Tunes DATE: 1889 (US Versions); 1684 (English Versions)
OTHER NAMES: "The Wexford Girl;" “The Oxford Tragedy;” “The Expert Girl;” Johnny McDowell,” "The Prentice Boy;" "Never Let the Devil Get the Upper Hand of You (Carter Family version);" "Cruel Miller;" "Printer's Boy;" "Butcher/Butcher's Boy;" "Hanged I Shall Be;" "Prentice Boy;" "Poor Ex-Soldier;"
RELATED TO: Lexington Murder; Berkshire Tragedy; Oxford Girl; Waco Girl; Danville Girl; Oxford Tragedy; Down in the Lone Green Valley;
RECORDING INFO: Mildred Tuttle, "Expert Town (The Oxford Girl)" (AFS; on LC12); American Balladry from British Broadsides, Amer. Folklore Society, Bk (1957), p267 (Wexford Girl); Birch, Amy. English Folk Music Anthology, Folkways FE 38553, LP (1981), cut#3.03 (He Pulled a Dagger); Blue Sky Boys. Original and Great: Early Authentic Country Recordings, Camden CAL 797, LP (1964), cut# 4 (Story of the Knoxville Girl); Blue Sky Boys. Bluegrass Mountain Music, Camden ADL-2-0726, LP (1974), cut# 8 (Story of the Knoxville Girl); Clayton, Paul. Bloody Ballads, Riverside RLP 12-615, LP (1956), cut#B.02 (Miller's Boy); Copeland Family. Music of the Ozarks, National Geographic Soc. 0703, LP (1972), cut# 14; East, Earnest; & the Pine Ridge Boys. Old Time Mountain Music, County 718, LP (1969), cut# 11; East, Scotty. New River Jam: One, Mountain 308, LP (197?), cut# 5; Ford, Brownie. Stories from Mountains, Swamps & Honky-Tonks, Flying Fish FF 90559, Cas (1990), cut#B.04; Lilly Brothers. Country Songs, Rounder SS002, LP (198?), cut# 12; Louvin Brothers. Tragic Songs of Life, Rounder SS012, LP (199?), cut#B.04; Mac and Bob (Lester McFarland & Robert A. Gardner). Mac and Bob's Great Old Song's - Vol 1, Old Homestead OHCS-158, LP (1985), cut#A.07; McBee, Hamper. Raw Mash, Rounder 0061, LP (1978), cut# 11; McBee, Hamper. Tennessee: The Folk Heritage, Vol. 2. The Mountains, Tennessee Folklore Soc. TFS-103, LP (198?), cut# 5; Smith, Betty. For My Friends of Song, June Appal JA 0018, LP (1977), cut# 12
SOURCES: Laws P35, "The Wexford Girl (The Oxford, Lexington, or Knoxville Girl; The Cruel Miller; etc.)" (Laws gives three broadside texts on pp. 104-112 of ABFBB); Randolph 150, "The Noel Girl" (12 texts, 5 tunes); Eddy 104, "The Murdered Girl" (8 texts, 2 tunes, but Laws assigns the B text to "The Banks of the Ohio" and omits the others. It would appear that Laws' A and C texts belong here); Doerflinger, pp. 288-290, "The Wexford Girl" (2 texts, 1 tune); Leach, pp. 785-787, "The Lexington Murder" (2 texts); Friedman, p. 225, "The Wexford Girl" (1 text+5 fragments of another text) Warner 7, "The Waxford Girl" (1 text, 1 tune); Cohen/Seeger/Wood, pp. 150-151, "Knoxville Girl" (1 text, 1 tune); Botkin-SoFolklr, p. 737, "The Knoxville Girl" (1 text, 1 tune); Kennedy 327, "The Oxford Girl" (1 text, 1 tune); Abrahams/Foss, pp. 115-116, "Knoxville Girl" (1 text, 1 tune); JHCox 90, "The Wesford Girl" (2 texts) MacSeegTrav 75, "The Wexford Girl" (1 text, 1 tune); Silber-FSWB, p. 224, "Knoxville Girl" (1 text); BBI, ZN1624, "Let all pretending Lovers"; ZN3196, "Young men and maidens all, give ear unto what I relate;" Andress, Bobby. Sweet Bunch of Daisies, Colonial Press, Bk (1991), p 30; McAllister, Marybird. Anglo-American Folksong Style, Prentice-Hall, Sof (1968), p6-9; New Lost City Ramblers. Old-Time String Band Songbook, Oak, Sof (1964/1976), p150;
NOTES: “The Knoxville Girl” is the US version of the “Wittham Miller/Berkshire Tragedy/ Cruel Miller” large group of songs from the British Isles, related to a different ballad "The Bloody Miller" in 1684 (based on Downfall of William Grismond" a similar murder in 1650). In the US The Berkshire Tragedy group is known as "The Wexford Girl," “The Oxford Tragedy,” “The Expert Girl,” "Johnny McDowell,” “The Prentice Boy,” “Never Let the Devil Get the Upper Hand of You” (Carter Family version) as well as other similar names. Many of the country/bluegrass versions include fiddle solo and breaks.
Bruce Olson has the text of "The Bloody Miller" in Scarse Songs 2 at www.erols.com/olsonw, which is similarly about a miller who impregnates his lover and murders her. It is the earliest known related sweetheart-murder ballad and is about a real murder in 1684. There are two copies of the shortened Berkshire Tragedy broadside under the same title, "The Bloody Miller" (they are different songs) as well as different “Wittham Miller/Berkshire Tragedy/ Cruel Miller” versions on the Bodleian Ballads website.
“The Knoxville Girl” story goes like this; boy meets girl, boy and girl go for a walk. They discuss their wedding, boy murders girl with a fence post/stick/piece of hedge, boy throws girl's body in river/pond, boy returns home at midnight and is let in by mother/father/master/miller who has a light, boy is questioned as to where all the blood has come from and in most instances I have come across always answers with "bleeding at my nose." He is taken and hanged.
This is a song that certainly caught the popular imagination in England and, later, America; it has also been found in Scotland and Ireland. Often called The Oxford Girl, this mutated into Wexford, Waxweed and all manner of odd things. Laws assigned it his number P35, and there are 200 versions in no. 263 in Steve Roud's Folksong index. Wexford Girl is a later form of the song, commonly found in America but rarely in England; it would, I suspect, be an Irish localisation of the earlier Oxford Girl. You can find several American tune variants through my first link above; meanwhile, I'll have a look around here; I certainly have one, The Wexford Murder, which Fred Hamer got from Walter Church of Bedfordshire; Church had in his youth (turn of the 19th/20th century) briefly emigrated to Canada, and learnt it from Irish friends there. (Malcolm from Mudcat)
Another version entitled, “Ekefield town” is about a town that does not exist; but this could be a garbled version of Hocstow, the original location. Samuel Pepys, well known for his love of music and singing, assembled a large collection of street ballads, which includes “The Bloody Miller.” Being a true and just account of one Francis Cooper of Hocstow near Shrewsbury, who was a Millers Servant, and kept company with one Anne Nicols for the space of two years, who then proved to be with Child by him, and being urged by her Father to marry her he most wickedly and barbarously murdered her, as you shall hear by the sequel.' This was the ancestor of a great family of songs on the same theme, widely known in Britain and America until recently, under such titles as '7he Cruel Miller' ,'The 'Prentice Boy', 'The Wexford Murder', 'The Berkshire Tragedy' and 'The Wittam Miller'. One motif which invariable appears is that of the guilty bloodstains, explained as a “bleeding at the nose.”
H. E. Rollins, the American ballad scholar, found a reference in a contemporary diary which authenticates and dates the Bloody Millerl murder: 'I heard of a murther near Salop on Sabb. day y/e [an e printed above an y] 10. instant, a woman fathering a conception on a Milner was Kild by him in a feild, her Body lay there many dayes by reason of y/e Coroner's absence.' (Mudcat)
Ozark folklore links this to the murder of one Lula Noel, whose body was discovered by the Cowskin River in Missouri in 1892. The song, however, is obviously older. Doerflinger traces it to a broadside about a murder committed at Reading, England in 1744. Botkin, following Cox (who follows Belden), traces it to the same Edinburgh broadside, "Berkshire Tragedy" or "The Wittam Miller" (Keed). Laws also lists this broadside in his catalog (it is, in fact, one of the texts he prints), but adopts his title based on common traditional usage. Laws, in fact, draws a stemma, starting from the "Berkshire Tragedy," and listing a total of seven "recensions" (p. 119), though he considers the broadside to be merely of eighteenth century date. I have a problem with the whole reconstruction, though: It's too literary. Even if one assumes the original ballad was a broadside (and I think Laws assumes this more often than is justified), it does not follow that its entire history is found in the broadsides. The song is so common that one must suspect the larger share of the later broadsides to be derived from tradition, rather than being the source of tradition. (From Traditional Ballad Index)
Here are the lyrics to “Knoxville Girl” from :
I met a little girl in Knoxville
A town we all know well
And every Sunday evening
Out in her home I'd dwell
We went to take an evening walk
About a mile from town
I picked a stick up off the ground
And knocked that fair girl down;
She fell down on her bended knees
For mercy she did cry
Oh, Willie dear, don't kill me here
I'm unprepared to die
She never spoke another word
I only beat her more
Until the ground around me
Within her blood did flow.
I took her by her golden curls
And I drug her 'round and 'round
Throwing her into the river
That flows through Knoxville town
Go down, go down, you Knoxville girl
With the dark and roving eyes
Go down, go down, you Knoxville girl
You can never be my bride.
I started back to Knoxville
Got there about midnight
My mother she was worried
And woke up in a fright
Saying, ""Dear son, what have you done
To bloody your clothes so?""
I told my anxious mother
I was bleeding at my nose.
I called for me a candle
To light myself to bed
I called for me a handkerchief
To bind my aching head
Rolled and tumbled the whole night through
As troubles was for me
Like flames of hell around my bed
And in my eyes could see.
*They carried me down to Knoxville
And put me in a cell
My friends all tried to get me out
But none could go my bail
I'm here to waste my life away
Down in this dirty old jail
Because I murdered that Knoxville girl
The girl I loved so well.
*Suggested change of lyric rhyme:
They carried me down to Knoxville and put me in THE JAIL
My friends all tried to get me out, but none could go my bail.
I'm doomed to spend my life away down in this dirty old CELL
Because I murdered that Knoxville girl, the girl I loved so well.
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