Sometimes She Sank- Black (ME) 1929 Barry B
[My title. Fragment from British Ballads from Maine, Barry Eckstrom, Smyth, 1929. Barry's notes follow. Barry alludes that this fragment is of the Scotch- Irish tradition (BFSSNE Vol. 10).
R. Matteson 2014]
The refrain was not given by Mrs. Black, nor was the air recorded. Stanzas correspond to child B 16, 17, 19. Similar stanzas are in many of Child's texts; B alone makes the miller's son give the alarm, while B, C have the reference to the mermaid. Since C is a conflate version, combined by Scott (Minstrelsy, II, 143) from B b (in the lost William Tytler-Brown MS), and fourteen stanzas of a different traditional text, it is possible that the mermaid is a unique feature of the B tradition.
B. [Sometimes She Sank.] Fragment taken down, September, 1929, from Mrs. Sarah (Robinson) Black, Southwest Harbor, who learned it of her mother, Mrs. Abby Kelley learned it of her mother, Mrs. Mary (Lurvey) Kelley, of Trenton.
1 Sometimes she sank, sometimes she swam,
Till she came to the miller's dam.
2 Out did run the miller's son,
And he saw the fair maid swimming down.
3 "O father, father, drawyour dam;
'Tis either a mermaid or a swan."