Pretty Polly- Hylton and Moseley (KY) 1917 Sharp I
[My title. Single stanza with music from English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians; Volume I; 1917 and 1932. Collected by Cecil J. Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. Edited by Maud Karpeles. The 1932 notes follow.
This is a standard US opening stanza text; I assume these are students (of Raine?) from Berea. In Sharp's Diary date May 25:
"Three students — the Hyltons & Moseley — come in in the afternoon & give me several songs."
R. Matteson 2016]
No. 49. The Cruel Ship's Carpenter (1932 notes)
Texts without tunes:—Broadsides by Pitts, Jackson & Son, and Bloomer (Birmingham). Ashton's A Century of Ballads, p. 101.
Texts with tunes :—Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs, ii. 99. Journal of the Folk-Song Society, i. 172. Folk Songs from Somerset, No. 83 (published also in English Folk Songs, Selected Edition, i. 4, and One Hundred English Folk-Songs, p. 4). Cox's Folk Songs of the South , pp. 308 (see also further references) and 528. Wyman and Brockway's Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs, p. 110, and Lonesome Tunes, p. 79. Journal of American Folk-Lore, xx. 262.
I. [Pretty Polly] The Cruel Ship's Carpenter- Sung by the Misses SARAH and DOCIA HYLTON and ABBY MOSELEY at Berea College, Madison Co., Ky., May 21, 1917[1]. Pentatonic. Mode 2.
1. O where is pretty Polly, O yonder she stands.
O where is pretty Polly, O yonder she stands;
Gold rings on her fingers and lily-white hands.
1. Diary dates this May 25.