Lord Henry- Grubb (VA) 1933 Davis EE
[Single stanza with music. Davis; More Traditional Ballad of Virginia, 1960. His notes follow. As usual Davis' notes give a detailed, well presented synopsis of this ballad and its significant details. Davis includes a paragraph about not being included in Bronson's TTCB but he waited twenty years after he had the material to get his book out (Bronson vol. 1 was 1959, Vol. 2 1962 but deadlines were much earlier). It may be for the best since some of the ballad recreations Davis included by the Smith brothers he should have left out.
R. Matteson 2014]
YOUNG HUNTING
(Child, No. 68)
A young man, back from hunting is invited by his mistress to come in and spend the night. He declines, explaining that he loves another better than he loves her. As he stoops to give her a farewell kiss, she stabs him mortally. She attempts, sometimes with help, to conceal the body in a well or other water, but her parrot, who will not be cajoled or threatened, presumably reveals her guilt.
Here Child F and most of the American texts end. Child A and other fuller texts go on to tell of the corning of the king's duckers, their finding of the body with the help of the bird, the lady's trial by fire (judicium ignis) and burning, while her comparatively innocent bower-woman accomplice escapes unscathed. There are other endings, some of them introduced from other ballads, some of them confused.
Child prints eleven texts of this excellent ballad, most of them of Scottish origin, but, if we may depend upon Margaret Dean-Smith and Gavin Greig's Last Leaves, it does not survive in print from recent British sources. It is fairly widely known in America, but chiefly in the south. Sharp-Karpeles (I, 101-14) print fourteen texts and tunes from the Southern Appalachians. TBVa presents six of a possible seven texts, with four tunes. More recently the Virginia collection has added nine new items, of which six are here presented, five of them with tunes, the sixth a full and distinctive text. Rather unaccountably, the Brown collection reports no text from North Carolina.
Like those of TBVa, the texts to follow lack the retributive conclusion of the Child collection and terminate before the arrival of the king's duckers. The temptation to confuse this ballad with "Lady Isabel and the the Knight" (Child, No. 4) natural enough, as they share the incidents of a lady drowning her false lover and of the talking bird has generally been resisted in this series. At least the contamination is not so overt as in TBVa E, and the bird stanzas sung here are found also in Child's texts of this ballad. Some contamination from "Sir Hugh" (Child, No. 155) may also be present in the description of the carrying of the corpse to the water.
There are several details of interest here: the moral conclusion of DD is unique in Virginia texts and the retreat to the parlor (BB, FF, and one omitted text) is a curious though not uncommon Americanization. The "other lady" is "in a foreign land" (BB, FF-, one other), "in the merry green land" (AA, DD), "in merry Green Lee" (CC), or (in one omitted text) "in old Scotland." The victim is "Henry" in all versions except one (see next paragraph). There appears to be some confusion in the purpose of the ring and in the presence of helpers and confidants.
The three omitted texts all come from the same county as FF, Dickenson County, and there is a temptation to print them as showing the extent of variation within a small geographical compass. But FF is the fullest and most distinctive of the four; the other three overlap in large measure with other texts here printed. A few points in the omitted texts may be noted: in one the name of the hero, also the local title, is Scot Eals, and he has a wife "in Old Scotland" (cf. Sharp-Karpeles A, I, tor-z) ; another, with the more usual title and hero Loving Henry, places the other girl (not wife) "in some Arkansas land" and (like BB and FF ) has the kissing and the murder take place "in some parlor room"; in a third, Margaret "leant herself across the fence" (cf. "face" in AA) to do her kissing and stabbing. All three are slightly compressed texts but tell the full story through the dialogue of the girl and the bird, the bird having the last word.
Interesting folk beliefs found in some Child versions have been lost from Virginia and American texts, along with the king's duckers: the belief that the body of a murdered man will emit blood upon being touched or approached by the murderer; the belief that a candle, floated over water, will detect a dead body; belief in justice via the ordeal by fire; oaths by corn, grass, or thorn. But the possibility that the talking bird represents a transmigration of the murdered man's soul remains in the texts that follow. See Wimberly, passim.
It is with uncommon regret that at this point we must part company with our distinguished companion, fellow-scholar, and friend, Bertrand Harris Bronson, whose great but as yet incomplete work on The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (Princeton University Press, 1959) has been drawn upon with such profit in every headnote up to the present one. Unhappily, only the first volume, covering Child ballads 1 to 53, has as yet appeared, and that just before this book's going to press. There is no regret over the eleventh-hour labor involved in these references to him, because they are recognized as a distinct enrichment of this volume. It would have been well, of course, if each of these near contemporaneous publications could have taken full account of the other. That being impossible, it is consoling that the headnotes up to this point have been able to include all relevant material from his first volume, if not from his subsequent ones. There is also some satisfaction in knowing that sooner or later he will have to take into account the highly relevant new material of this book.
EE. "Lord Henry." Collected by Miss Alfreda M. Peel, of Salem, Va. Sung by Mrs. Fanny Grubb, of Back Creek, Va. Roanoke County. September 1933. Tune noted by Mrs. Kathleen Kelty Coxe, of Roanoke, Va.
She thought it was her brother,
Returning from his kin[1],
But, no, it was her Henry
Returning from his wild hunting
1. king?