Recordings & Info: 7S. Down in a Meadow (Unfortunate Swain)
Unfortunate Swain, The
DESCRIPTION: The singer goes to a meadow to pick a rose and asks why he must "love a girl that will break my heart." He will love only her. "He that loves an unkind maid, I am sure he strives against the stream" When she dies he will still think about her.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1975 (recording, Jasper Smith)
KEYWORDS: love separation death ship flowers grief floatingverses nonballad
FOUND IN: Britain(England(Lond))
Roud #60
RECORDINGS:
Jasper Smith, "Down In The Meadow" (on Voice11)
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Harding B 22(312), "The Unfortunate Swain" ("Down in a meadow fair and gay"), unknown, n.d.
NOTES: The description is from broadside Bodleian Harding B 22(312).
Roud puts this with "Love Has Brought Me to Despair" [Laws P25]. I agree that it shares floating verses with the family of songs Roud lumps together under that number. If I had only the Jasper Smith version on Voice11 I would have done the same. The broadside Bodleian Harding B 22(312), has (almost) the same first verse and shares the remaining two verses of Smith's version including one that I haven't seen among the floaters:
A ship there is that sails the sea.
She's loaded deep as deep can be,
But not so deep as the love I'm in.
I care not whether I sink or swim.
The broadside makes it clear that the man of the couple is the singer. It ends
When my love is dead and at her rest
I'll think of her whom I love best.
To wrap her up in linen strong
I'll think of her when dead and gone.
Smith's version seems so likely to have come directly from this or a closely related broadside that I think I am justified in making the broadside and its derivative a separate song. - BS
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Karpeles
Cumberland Gap folksongs of the S. Appalachians.
Down in the meadow
FSU-60-908 Folktracks
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[From Belden; "Ballads and Songs," 1940. His notes follow. Both stanzas are found in in mid-1700s broadsides, The Unfortunate Swain/Picking Lilies. "Must I Go Bound" is frequently part of the American versions.
R. Matteson 2017]
The Blue-Eyed Boy
Here divers images or motifs seem to have been gathered around a refrain stanza which gives the name to the song. I have found. it reported from else-where only in Nebraska (ABS 272-3). In A the refrain stanza is not marked as such and the other elements are the hand and lips image (vaguely remembered from The Lass of Roch Royal), the turtle dove, the green willow tree, and 'Must I go bound while he goes free?';[1] in B, the lover going to sea, the value of a true friend., the little bird, and the refrain stanza; in C, the harp hung on the willow tree (which here has thrust the 'blue-eyed boy' stanza from its place as refrain),'Must I go bound and you go free?', the value of a true friend, and the turtle dove. D lacks the 'blue-eyed boy' altogether, but I have included it here because of the 'Must I go bound' stanza; the other stanza belongs to the tradition of 'There is an Alehouse in Yonder Town,' for which see the headnote to The Butcher Boy.
D. No title. Secured by Miss Hamilton in 1909 from Nita Stebbins of the West Plains High School, who described it as 'a country dance' which she learned, from an old woman who used to live in the country.'
As I walked out one morning in May
Gathering flowers all so gay,
I gathered white and I gathered blue
And little did I think what love could do.
Must I go bound, must you go free,
Must I love a pretty girl that won't love me?
Oh, no! no! it never can be,
For love like thee never conquered me.
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1. Known also in Dorsetshire (JFSS VII 69), Virginia (TBV 269-70, SCSM 284-5 319), and North Carolina (BMFSB 50-1, SCSM 288 288). It goes back at least to the seventeenth century; see Ronburghe Ballads YII 104-5.