Pretty Polly- Maud Kilburn (KY) 1917 Sharp J
[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; Sharp's Diary: Several students came in in the morning and I took some good songs from Maud Kilburn and Ollie Huff.
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.
J. [Pretty Polly] The Cruel Ship's Carpenter- Sung by Mrs. MAUD KILBURN at Berea, Madison Co., Ky., May 31, 1917. Pentatonic. Mode 2.
Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me,
Before we get married some pleasures to see,
Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me,
Before we get married some pleasures to see.