Little Guinea Gay Haw- Harmon (NC) c1927 Burton
[From Some Ballad Folks by Thomas Burton, 1990. Lena Harmon (b. 1911) is the daughter of Lee Monroe Presnell (collected by Warner) and Council Harmon (legendary storyteller and singer) was Presnell's grandfather on his mother's side. Lee Monroe was a preacher who also played banjo and sang. Lena learned this from her father by the time she was 16 circa 1927 since she left home then.
The following is a short excerpt from Burton's book.
R. Matteson 2014]
LENA HARMON (Excerpt by Burton)
And then at other times the spiritual songs meant more to him. And he'd sing those. He'd sing and he'd get the song book. And we had a kerosene lamp; I'd set there and hold the lamp till I'd get so sleepy that I'd nearly fall over, but I wouldn't give up. And I helt the light that way for him to read to get his sermons up and also to sing the songs that he had wrote down. And I'd done any way to heard him sing the songs, go through about anything to just have a night there with him to sing the songs, you know, and hear him.
He loved 'em all. He loved that old banjer he had. He loved it; aw, there's not many people that have a million-dollar home like Dad loved that banjer. He'd get that old banjer down and start singin' those jigs, aw, he was good on the banjer. He just couldn't be beat. He was always a person that no matter what you were doin' with him, if it was out hoeing corn, it was as though you was on a picnic. He was that kind of daddy. He was cheerful. He was very courageous; he had courage that people don't have today. And he was just, you know, being with him was just-well, it was just the happiest time of my life."
Lena loved her daddy, but she didn't know much about his parents. "He talked to us quite a bit about his mother and father, but they were old-timers. I remember him one time a-tellin' about his father a-stayin' with them after his mother passed away. And he had always cooked, you know, on open fire; and Mother-she'd laugh about it- she came in from the field to fix dinner and she was a-goin' to do something when she first got in, and she'd asked him to build a fire in the stove for her while she did whatever this was. And so he built it in the oven where you put the bread and smoked 'em out. That's how much he knew about stoves."
One song Lena remembers her father singing is "The Little Guinea Gay Haw" ("Edward," Child 13):
1. "How come that blood all over your hands?
Son, come tell to me."
"It's the blood of the little guinea gay haw [1]
That rode by the side of me, me, me,
That rode by the side of me."
2. "How come that blood all over your hands?
Son, come tell to me."
"It's the blood of only my brother
That rode by the side of me, me, me,
That rode by the side of me."
3. "What did you fall out about?
Son, come tell to me."
"We fell out about that little red rose bush
That might have made a tree, tree, tree,
That might have made a tree."
4. "When are you a-comin' home?
Son, come tell to me."
"I'll be at home when the sun sets in the East
And that will never be, be, be,
And that will never be."
The song isn't one of her favorites. "I never did learn all that. It was a song to me, was a little bit too horrible to sing too much." One reason for her reservation is the fratricide: "It involved killing his brother"; but another reason is her interpretation of the circumvention regarding the death: "And he lied so about it, told so many different things." The song obviously touches sensitivities that the other bloody ballads do not. "I never did really like that song too well because of what happened in it. of course it's real like all the others, but too real to me. Dad sung it quite a bit. I never; I didn't think too much about that song."
One phrase in the song she doesn't quite understand is the title itself, "guinea gay haw" (ostensibly at one time "guinea gray hawk"), "Said it was the blood of the little guinea gay haw that rode by the side of him; so it must've been somethin' like a donkey, a mule, or a horse, maybe, a pony of some kind." (Mrs. Rena's comments about the "hawk" in "Jobal Hunter" offer an interesting comparison; knowing a lot about hawks but not falconry, she said: "They carried with them a hawk; it's something they cut with"-- apparently she thought of hawk as tomahawk. Even though Lena doesn't often sing "The Little Guinea Gay Haw," she does draw parallels between it and her experiences. "You know, people do have tempers like that. And it's happened more than once there's someone's been killed in an argument over some trivial thing that really wasn't anything at all, but they made it out of it by their quick tempers and gettin' mad and sayin' the wrong thing at the wrong time."
1. guinea gray hawk