Maddy Gross- Brown (CA) 1957 Western Folklore (early 1900s)
[From: Two Child Ballads in the West by Wayland D. Hand; Western Folklore, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jan., 1959), pp. 42-45. His notes follow.
The second stanza is similar to the stanza found in Lord Thomas:
"Despise her not," Lord Thomas he says,
"Despise her not to me;
For I do love your little finger
Better than her whole body." (Davis J, stanza 11)
R. Matteson 2012, 2015]
MADDY GROSS
This fragment of "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard" (Child 81) deals with the punishment of the erring wife at the end of what is usually a fairly long and detailed ballad. It came to me through the singing of Miss Mary G. Brown, of Riverside, California, and was recorded August 7, 1957, at Lake Arrowhead, California. Miss Brown heard it as a little girl in Delaware County, Indiana, in the early 1900's, first from her English grandmother, and then from her mother. The ballad continued to be sung in the family when it later moved to Milton, Wisconsin, north of Madison. Miss Brown never remembers hearing any other stanzas, and she was always troubled as to why the woman had so heartlessly been killed. "When other people began singing it," she said, "I went off and hid my head." Miss Brown's pronunciation in two singings softened from "Maddy" to "Matty," and in one refrain the "s" sound of "Gross" gave way to an almost inaudible "v" in "Groves."
[music]
I took her by the lily-white hand,
I led her down the lane;
I asked her which she liked the best
Little Maddy Gross or me,
Little Maddy Gross or me.
"Now much I love your cheek, my dear,
Now much I love your chin;
Much better do I love Little Matty Gross
Than you and all your kin,
Than you and all your kin."
I took her by the lily-white hand,
I led her down the lane;
I drew a sword from off my side,
And she never spoke again,
She never spoke again.
Though not found in the Child corpus, except in a stanza denoting the value placed on the lover's cheeks and chin,[3] all three verses of this fragment exist singly, or in combination, in versions from key states in the North, South, and Middle West.[4] A wider conflation of texts would doubtless prove the popularity of this less well-known ending of "Little Musgrave and Lady
Barnard" in other parts of the country.
University of California, Los Angeles
Footnotes:
3 Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (lo Parts, Boston, 1882-1898), III, 252, G 26 ff.; 254, I 21.
4 Phillips Barry, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, and Mary Winslow Smyth, British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, 1929), pp. 153 f., stanzas 21-23, passim; Arthur Kyle Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), p. 298, stanzas 1o-12; H. M. Belden, Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society ("University of Missouri Studies," Vol. XV, 1940), p. 60.