Little Willie- Etta Harwood (NC) 1931 Scarborough D
[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.
This ballad is pieced out in some instances with parts of a song current in America, called "The Silver Dagger," or "The Bloody Dagger," but they are not the same.
A song written down by Etta Mae Harwood in the notebook of manuscript songs presented to Miss Clementine Douglass, of Asheville, North Carolina, by the girls in the weaving room of her shop, bears the title "Little Willie" It has a tragedy, worked out by means of a dagger which assists the suicide of two lovers separated by their parents, similar to that in the well-known
American folk song called "The silver Dagger," or " The Bloody Dagger," but the songs are not the same. This one is related to
one published in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society, I, 269, called "Oh, Who Is That Rapping at My Window?"
(D) Little Willie [original spelling kept]
Who is knocking at my window?
who is morning that pitiful morn?
It's I, your own true lover
open the door and let me in.
Mary dear, go ask your mother
if she'll consent you [be a] bride to me.
If she says 'no' come back and tell me;
No more this night I'll trouble thee.
There's no use to ask my mother,
she intends to keep me free,
so Willie dear, go court, another,
another girl more prettier than me.
Mary dear go ask your father
if he'll consent you [be a] bride to me;
if he says no' return and tell me;
no more this night I'll trouble thee.
There's no use to ask my Father,
he lay down to take his rest,
and in his hand a shining dagger
to kill the one that I love best.
He picked up the shining Dagger,
Pierced it through his aching heart,
says farewell, Mary, farewell darling,
for you and I are now apart.
She picked up the bloody dagger
Pierced it through her lily-white breast,
Says farewell father farewell mother;
for Willie and I are now at rest.