Six Kings' Daughters- Patrick Gainer (West Virginia) c. 1971
[From Folk Songs From the West Virginia Hills, 1975 by Patrick Gainer. Also West Virginia Digital Collections Online: Child Ballads Number 4: Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight (The Six Kings' Daughters).
Listen: The Six Kings' Daughters, performed by Patrick Gainer
https://www.libraries.wvu.edu/collections/patrickgainer/media/Sng4LadyIsabel.mp3
This recording was done while Gainer was working on his book c. 1971 (the notes from the book and the online introduction are the same). I have no idea who his Aunt Mary Gainer is; she would be quite old if she was alive. Gainer provides no information in the book or recording about his Aunt Mary Gainer and this, in itself, is suspicious.
Notes from online site follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
Patrick Ward Gainer (1904-1981)
Born in Parkersburg but reared in rural Gilmer County, Gainer grew up within a family bearing a rich singing tradition. He often credited his grandfather F.C. Gainer with providing his early musical education and his chief inspiration.
After attending the Glenville Normal School, Gainer enrolled at West Virginia University in the 1920s. At the time the university was recognized as a national hub of folk music scholarship. His instructors included John Harrington Cox, author of the first significant American folksong study - Folk Songs of the South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925) and Louis Watson Chappell whose landmark book John Henry: A Folklore Study (Jena: Frommanische Verlag, 1933) established a standard in ballad scholarship. It was under their tutelage that Gainer first caught the ballad hunting bug. Together with Chappell, and at other times with fellow student and Gilmer Countian Carey Woofter, Gainer made his initial forays into the countryside in search of surviving remnants of a fading musical tradition.
THE SIX KING'S DAUGHTERS
(CHILD 4, "LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT")
Numerous versions of this ballad have been found, in West Virginia, but in none of these is the knight a preternatural character. He is only a wicked man who promises to marry the lady if she will take some of her parents' money and the two best horses in the stable and, ride away with him to Scotland. sung by Aunt Mary Gainer, Gilmer county.
1 Go saddle up the two best steeds
That stand in your father's stall,
And away to Scotland we will go.
Where married we will be.
2 She brought him some of her father's gold
And some of her mother's fee,
And took him to her father's barn,
Where horses stood thirty and three.
3 She mounted on the milk-white steed,
And he on the dapple gray,
And they rode till they came to the ocean side,
Three hours before it was day.
4 "O get you down, fair lady," he said,
"Get ye down, I tell to thee,
For six king's daughters I have drowned here,
And the seventh one you shall be.
5 "Take off, take off that costly robe
And present it unto me,
For it is a pity such a costly robe
Should rot in the salt, salt sea."
6. "O turn your face to the willow tree
O turn your back to me,
For it is a pity such a false-hearted man
A naked woman's body should see."
7. He turned himself around and about
His face to the willow tree.
She gathered him in her lily-white arms
And threw him in the sea.
8. "O lie you there, you false-hearted man,
Lie there instead of me,
For you promised to Scotland we would go,
Where married we would be."
9. She mounted on her milk-white steed,
And led the dapple-gray.
She rode till she came to her father's house
Two hours before it was day.