Silver Dagger- Joan Baez (NY) 1960 REC
[From 1960 recording; Vanguard VRS 9078 by Joan Baez. The first verse is traditional but reworded. The second and third are traditional reworded but not from Drowsy Sleeper. The last stanza is partially "Drowsy Sleeper" reworded, with the last line from another source. This is not a traditional version but rather a reworking of Drowsy Sleeper with additional stanzas from other folk songs. However, because of it's title and popularity I'm including it here.
Baez's version appears in Folksinger's Wordbook, p. 193 by Irwin Silber and Fred Silber in 1973. They reworded some of it and gave it a new title to avoid copyright issues. It's obviously the version by Baez.
Silber: "Don't Sing Love Songs"
Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleepin' close by my side.
And in her right hand she holds a dagger,
etc.
Additional notes from The Life of a Song: ‘Silver Dagger’ follow.
R. Matteson 2016]
The Life of a Song: ‘Silver Dagger’ by David Honigmann:
“Then and there” included a joint performance at the Philharmonic Hall in New York on Halloween 1964. The trajectory of Baez and Dylan’s artistic relationship had gone from his being her guest at concerts to her being his. “Going to do one of Bob Dylan’s earliest songs”, she said, before singing “Silver Dagger”.
The song is not, of course, by Dylan. It dates back to long before his birth, perhaps to Victorian England. In it, a young woman rejects a lover’s advances by pleading her mother’s implacable opposition and her weaponry — “in her right hand, a silver dagger”. The narrator’s absent father is at once “a handsome devil” and an object lesson in not trusting men: “He’s got a chain five miles long/ And on every link a heart does dangle/ Of another maid he’s loved and wronged . . . ”
"Silver Dagger" arranged, reworked and sung by Joan Baez; 1960.
Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.
All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.
My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.
Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.