Bluegrass Messengers

The Bold Soldier of Yarrow
by Norman Cazden
 The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 268 (Apr. - Jun., 1955), pp. 201-209

THE BOLD SOLDIER OF YARROW
BY NORMAN CAZDEN

IN an earlier study of the Yarrow ballads[1] we posed three things of interest for the understanding of the processes of popular balladry. First, by analyzing the text of a Catskill version, "The Dewy, Dewy Dens of Yarrow," as sung by the late George Edwards, we indicated the essential identity of the "two" Yarrow ballad strains classified by Child, "The Braes of Yarrow" (No. 214) and "Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow" (No. 215). Second, we emphasized the economy, the vividness and the deep poetic validity of the imagery, and even of the rhyme scheme, in the Yarrow ballads. Thus, the well-known lines

'Oh, mother dear, go make my bed,
Go make it neat and narrow,
For my love died last night for me,
I will die for him tomorrow!'

appear as proper and integral to the Yarrow ballad theme, but they are quite out of place in "Barbara Allen," where they also commonly occur. Finally, we suggested that the profoundly tragic content of the Yarrow ballads could be comprehended only in terms of their commentary on the social conditions of feudal Scotland, whence the ballad came, and the impact of those conditions on the individual.

This last point in particular suggested that, when these social conditions changed, we might expect some parallel change in a ballad describing their essence. True, this would not prevent a continued remembrance of the original song, and in fact versions of the Yarrow ballads have been retained in popular oral tradition. But, alongside it, a new poetic resolution of the tragic conflict ought to result. And this is precisely what appears in a parallel to the Yarrow ballads, set in a later period. Once again, we are fortunate to have an example, also from the Catskill Mountain area, and from the inexhaustible repertory of George Edwards. It is a version of the well-known song, "The Bold Soldier."[2]

There was a bold soldier that lately came from war;
He courted a rich lady, with honor in great store;
Her fortune was so large that it scarcely could be told;
Still she loved the soldier because he was so bold.

"Bold soldier, bold soldier, I fain would be your wife,
My father is so cruel, he'd take away my life!"
He drew his sword and pistols, hung 'em by his side,
He swore they would get married, whatever should betide.

They both rode off to church. Returning home again,
They met her cruel father with seven other men.
"Now," says the lady, "we shall both be slain."
"Fear nothing, fear nothing," the soldier cried amain.

Her father stepped up, and these words he did say,
"Is this your wedding season, dear daughter, I pray?
If this is your intendance to be a soldier's wife,
All in this lonesome valley I shall end your life!"

"Stop!" cried the soldier, "I've no time to prattle,
Although I am a naked man, I'm fitted for this battle."
He drew his sword and pistols and caused them to rattle,
And the lady hild the horse while the soldier fought the battle.

The first one he came to, he quickly had him slain;
The next one he came to, he served him the same.
"Oh, run," cried the rest, "or we will all be slain;
To fight a galliant soldier, we'll find it all in vain."

"Bold soldier, bold soldier, what makes you fight so bold?
You shall have my daughter and ten thousand pounds in gold."
"Oh, no," cried the lady, "that fortune is too small;
Fight on, my galliant soldier, and you shall win it all."

"Bold soldier, bold soldier, please spare to me my life;
You may have my daughter for your wedded wife."
He took them both home and he called them his heirs:
It was not for love, but it was pureli from fear.

Come, all you ladies who have money laid in store,
Never despise a soldier because he's sometimes poor.
A soldier is a gentleman, so jolly, brisk, and free;
Boldly he will fight for his rights and liberty.

In judging the connection between "The Bold Soldier" and "The Dens of Yarrow," we are well warned not to expect a simple or mechanical alteration of the The Bold Soldier of Yarrow original ballad text to fit new settings. Even the process of record, the coming to consciousness of these new settings, and their rendering in new strains of popular poetry, are themselves strongly altered. The Yarrow ballads underwent long and thoughtful germination to reach their presently known forms. Tended by numberless popular poets, their imagery constantly developed and refined, enriched and remolded and pared down, they reflected the full power and piquancy of the tale of young lovers destroyed by the rigid maintenance of social status. The transformation of this underlying historical framework is slow, erratic, involved, and hidden under many surface changes. We cannot therefore presume that the implications of these new settings became rather suddenly clear and conscious. Such is not the way of popular poetry or of history, which, we have seen, tend to become very much the same thing. We ought not to expect, therefore, a century or so after the probable reference date of the Yarrow ballads, which is before the turn of the seventeenth century, to find simply a "new version" with a few additional stanzas and, let us say, a new ending grafted on. For even the initial form, the locale, the style and language, the manner of growth of the newer popular poetry were altered in unsuspected ways, and the original poetic processes were largely uprooted. Thus not only was the story changed, but also the way songs are created.

Hence we must be prepared to seek our comparisons in often distant quarters and in unlikely new forms. While observing due caution in evaluating seeming similarities of non-essentials, we ought to pursue the underlying correspondences boldly and without academic narrowness, in recognition of the fluidity of forms that comes about during major historical upheavals. We must look to the substance of popular poetry, and not merely to its rendition, though at their best these become inseparable. To this end the analytic concept of the image, meaning by this both a poetic form and its real reference considered jointly, ought to aid us in a closer examination of the two songs. Let us put down the Catskill version of the Yarrow ballads, completing it from lines common to many other versions, in order to identify the essential images.

(As he went down yon dewy den,
Sorrow went him before, 0;
Nine well-wight men lay waiting him
Upon the braes of Yarrow.)

("I have your sister to my wife,
Ye think me an unmeet marrow,
But yet one foot will I never flee
Now from the braes of Yarrow.")

There were seven sons, and two of them twins,
There were seven sons in the Yarrow,
And all did fight for their own true love
In the dewy, dewy dens of Yarrow.

(Four he hurt, and five he slew
In the dewy dens of Yarrow,
Till that stubborn knight came him behind
And ran his body thorough.)

"Oh, mother dear, I had a dream,
A dream of grief and sorrow;
I dreamed I was gathering pretty heather bloom
In the dewy, dewy dens of Yarrow."

"Daughter dear, I read your dream,
Your dream of grief and sorrow:
Your love, Jimmy, is lying slain
'Way down in the dens of Yarrow."

She sot him up, she sot him down,
She sot him all through Yarrow,
And there she found him lying slain
At the back of a bush into Yarrow.

She washed his face, she combed his hair,
She combed it neat and narrow,
And then she washed the bloody, bloody wownd
That he had got in Yarrow.

Her hair, it was three quarters long,
And the color of it was yallow;:
She wrapped it 'round his middle so small,
And she carried him home from Yarrow.

"Daughter dear, don't be so grieved,
 Don't be so grieved with sorrow
I'll lead you to a better, better one
Than the one you lost into Yarrow."

"Oh, mother dear, go make my bed,
Go make it neat and narrow,
For my love died last night for me, I will die for him tomorrow."  

She dressed herself into clean, white clothes,
And away to the waters of Yarrow;
And there she laid her own self down,
And she died on the banks of Yarrow.

By extracting the common images, we recognize without difficulty the similarity of the situations given in the two songs, and their divergence precisely at the point where the earlier social conditions required a tragic end and the newer ones a successful
adventure. What were these conditions?

In the conditions of the Yarrow ballads, the hero's low caste is equivalent to his lack of "title" to land property. For the protection of feudal-type, single-line inheritance of that property, the clan must enforce a prohibition of the full development of the heroine, symbolized by personal love. Hence the emphasis on the deeply personal quality of the love symbol in the attitude of the heroine, in the fury of the hero's defense, in the apprehensive concern, in the acts of hygienic attention, in the simple reference to the marriage bed, in the refusal of consolation, and in the final suicide. Whole-hearted individual love is thus symbolically opposed to the formal, stylized "chivalric" love of feudal poetry, which drifts off on one side towards unsexed mysticism and on the other to adultery.

The brothers and/or their retainers support the clan basis of control of the land by ambush, treachery, and the defilement of traditional rites. Thus they symbolize at once the hidden character of feudal rule, its shamefaced methods, and the hollowness of the high moral claims of the "chivalrous knights" when measured against their real action towards "inferiors." The dream image introduces a nature-fetish, but its interpretation shows the recognition of the reality behind that fetish, leading to the search or confronting of the reality. The final suicide shows how inevitably the social forms no longer fulfill human needs, but frustrate them.

In the later song we find reflected the rise of mercantile capitalism in the British Isles. Willie, the ploughboy, has been dispossessed by enclosures. He survives as a "free" individual, meaning a person separated from all resource. In his lesser self Willie must now sell the power of his strong arm for a wage, but in his ideal self he becomes also the independent and dashing adventurer. Early broadside versions portray him as a keeper or a sailor.

On the other side of the conflict, the brothers of the feudal clan have begun to lose the privileges conferred on them by property in land and maintained by their monopoly of armed power. For the land is now mortgaged to obtain the new kind of fluid property called money, and the lordly knight in armor is no match for the pistols of the common soldier. Further, the feudal clan is now dispersed, and the armed retainers of old are replaced by hired servants, who are beholden to their master only as he pays them, and who fly at the first threat to themselves. And so once more Willie fights the brothers for his love. But the issue is different, for now he wins, not only his love, but also her inheritance.

So much for the argument. But wherein lies the connection in fact between the ploughboy of Yarrow and the Bold Soldier? There is, to be sure, no direct relationship or genealogy to be drawn. No line of text, no trace of language, style, or rhythm is similar. Even the way in which the songs came about is known to be quite different. We cannot, therefore, term the later song a modernized version of the early ballad. And yet it constitutes a direct transfer of the imagery, the content, the social theme of the Yarrow ballads into later conditions, which happen to affect also the making of songs. As history, the victory of eighteenth century "individual freedom" economy over the restrictions of feudal rule, translated i nto popular poetry and song, means precisely that the tragic tale of Willie of Yarrow becomes the audacious and cheerful victory of the Bold Soldier.

The numerous versions of "The Bold Soldier" stem from broadsides of before the eighteenth century. Early texts in Roxburghe date from 1673, and appear in this country in the Echo, or Columbian Songster for I800. Unlike the Yarrow ballads, the lines of the later song were surely written by an unknown penny-sheet writer of small talent, and are not the result of a process of popular creative accretion. A comparison o f the poetic values of the two songs shows very clearly the effects of these different sources.

But where does the less-than-inspired, money-seeking, scribbler get his material? How does it win popular sale? Here we must recall that writing for the hawker's market is as characteristic of its time as the earlier homespun product and the more recent industrialized stereotypes. The scrivener relies on very concrete and immediate sources for his text, as well as for his printing, his tune, his woodcut, and his distribution. He is guided by his bills, his acquaintances, his hunches, his lucky contacts. Therefore he must draw his material from the available populars ources, and in this way win a proper popular appeal, by means far different from the manufactures of modern promotion techniques.

Thus the broadside writer necessarily draws from the existing store of traditional music and poetry, including the ballad themes. He writes them out as he has heard them. He fills in where his memory fails. He adapts them to tunes in current vogue. He copies portions already known and successful, or sold out. He repeats certain tell-tale cliches of sentimental expression. He matches h is characters to popular sympathies. He completes or alters a story to fit some occasion or some newsy parallel. He plagiarizes and parodies anything that has obtained good will, for this is the surest way to ease his sales. He does what the modern "entertainment" producer pretends to do, by giving his public what it wants.

So, unlike his younger cousin, the juke-box lyricist, the broadside writer is very close to his audience. He deals with their problems and interests, and does not avoid them by means of a special escape jargon. He reflects not only the desires, but also the traditions, of his listeners. He convinces them that the song is of themselves, in principle about themselves, and in large part by themselves. He merely has turned into complete phrases the images they have provided, and for this service and the printed sheet charges his penny. Thus the anonymous balladeer, whatever his faults and failings, could work only on the basis of a popular tradition. If this has not always resulted in the best poetry, it has also given rise to a Robert Burns.

The connection between the Yarrow ballads and "The Bold Soldier" is not generally noted. The reason is that the traditions of popular song are not understood sufficiently as poetic fixations of real history. Instead, they have been studied mechanically and with certain preconceptions. The result has been a sort of pseudohistory telling of the "deterioration" of the beautiful old ballads from their presumed high origins, as they have filtered down among the common folk of a later age. A hierarchy has been set up, and it may be observed in most regional collections of ballads and folk songs in this country. First come the "true" Child ballads, then their "secondary" derivatives and other doggerel of the rabble, and last come songs not traceable to the Anglo-Saxon tradition at all, if indeed any such are included.

Unlike the Yarrow ballads, "The Bold Soldier" is not recognized by Child as a "true" ballad. Its versions have been ranked regularly as "secondary" forms, which in academic circles is equivalent to recommending its exclusion from serious consideration or study. Davis and Eddy both list "The Bold Soldier" as a descendant of "Earl Brand" (Child, No. 7). Barry, Belden, Brewster, Flanders, and Gardner place it as a derivative of "Erlinton"( Child, No. 8). Eddy and Brewster give only the Child ballad titles, though their texts clearly belong to "The Bold Soldier."

What is meant by a "secondary form"? Is some mysterious primacy attained merely by placing a Child ballad title at the head of a song text? Implied in the hierarchy are highly artificial considerations set up by ballad scholars. Despite their dealing with "popular" poetry transmitted through a markedly social process, the criteria for an approved and exalted category of traditional songs come uncomfortably close to an unwitting aristocratic bias.

Is the Child ballad "primary" because of its age, and perhaps its archaic language? Regard for these reflects only a nostalgia for the mystified "glories" of medieval times. We may observe that, in our version of the Yarrow text, the quaintness is gone, though the poetry remains, and indeed it uses certain mannerisms of current, local, speech.

Is the "true" ballad superior to its lowly derivatives in its origins? Strangely, it is seriously maintained, or at least implied in the work of some scholars, that the "popular" ballads were created by an aristocracy. In this topsy-turvy view, true folk balladry does not originate among the common people at all, but among the cultured and refined lords and ladies. It is supposed to become popular tradition by a sort of seepage downward, in much the way national prosperity is supposed to be achieved. We received descriptions of how the uncouth majority, incapable of a worthy creative process,adopts the ideology, the speech, the clothes, the manners and the ethics of its "betters." Even so, the understanding and the memory of the folk are somewhat faulty, hence their debasement of the initially fine literary standards. Admittedly, the common people also compose songs, but these are deprecated either as bad copies or as poor and lowly ditties. "Popular" poetry is therefore sought chiefly in the remnants of lordly language supposed to underlay the dross of mountaineer crudeness, as for example when Child ballads a re brought to light in the Southern Highlands.

In such "objective" terms as these, it becomes obvious why so non-aristocratiac songs as "The Bold Soldier" is rated as merely a debased popular treatment of certain "eternal" ballad themes found in "Earl Brand" or in "Erlinton." It is by these standards that the literary scholar will treasure fragments of Child ballad lines, perhaps sung to the tune of "There's a Tavern in the Town," for he is not a musician.

The theme of a "primary" ballad is also held to center on characters of a real-life aristocracy. Worthy students have held in all seriousness that true tragedy must involve individuals of high social station and importance as principal figures. Tragedy befalling the ordinary man or woman is by comparison in consequential and uninteresting, its victims being presumably in sensitive to pain, incapable of its artistic expression, and anyhow not remarkable. The daily struggles and sufferings among the common folk are not regarded as of potentially universal import, so that there would be little reason to retain them in the people's memory. The tragedy of the ploughboy is held not equal in dramatic intensity to the moods of the noble lord. It is conveniently forgotten, where these things seem to have any substance, that the tragedians have from time immemorial been the jesters and the lackeys of the noble lord, so that it behooved them to produce exactly that flattering impression. We are merely asked to note that a principal symptom of a "debased" or "secondary" ballad is the disappearance of the "noble" titles. This aspect makes the Yarrow ballads especially interesting, for the hero turns out to be a ploughboy and not a lord, and the tragedy hinges on this very point. In literary hands, however, such details have a way of getting lost, or edited out, or reconstructed into their opposites, as we have seen done openly by Walter Scott, and uncritically repeated b y others.

Literary toyings with ballad themes have, in fact, led to another criterion of "primary" status. The "true" ballad is transmitted by oral means, we are told, so that broadside origins are systematically to be regarded as evidence of low caste, late vintage, absence of traditional roots, and literary poverty. If a song was learned from a printed source, it is by that fact of an inferior order. Here it is the literacy of the common people, and not their lack of it, which is held a fault. Yet a little investigations hows that a decline in poetry, coincident with a widespread learning of letters, does not appear among the common folk, but among the well-to-do. The literate, well-educated children of the formerly unlettered men of affairs have been notoriously feeble in the creation of poetry and music. A t best they will recall the less guarded singing of a governess, or tutor, or other servant, or they are still able, if rarely willing, to hire professional talent.

Now it happens that "The Braes of Yarrow" has been transmitted in several printed versions," improved" by highly artificial and "elevated" language, among the refined and sophisticated sector of the population. The earliest such literary paraphrase was issued by William Hamilton of Bangour, in 1760. In it the archaic treatment is so forced and pretentious, and the romanticizing of feudal conditions so plain, as to make the later" alteration" of Scott a somewhat second-hand exploitation. Existing oral tradition does not show the Hamilton or the Scott versions as a source. Thus it is in high circles, rather than in lowly ones, that borrowings from the old ballads combine with a deterioration of their poetic values. In fact what we observe is a passing of the homespun integrity of popular poetry as self-conscious amateurs and literary professionals ransacked their store of traditional tales and images for ready sale upon an expanding market.

From the opposite side, we may suggest that old songs that can be traced to printed song-sheets are not necessarily worse on that account, nor need they be lacking in ancient popular tradition. Poor quality in the penny-prints is not due to commoner tastes, but to the substitution of a kind of literary pawn shop for the live creative traditions of the people. Most broadsides, even when written on timely and political topics, arise precisely as new statements, new applications, or parodies of some traditional theme. They include the form, the manner, the music, and many of the details that have proven familiar and meaningful. The absence of a printed version of a ballad believed to be in the oral tradition may testify to its loss, or to the rarity of writing and printing at the time and place of its singing. Most ballad singers are so little ashamed of a printed source that they will tell repeatedly of "books" of songs which they inherited, though these often turn out either to be schoolroom copybooks or else to have been lost with miraculous regularity.

The available form of a ballad or song is neither more nor less contrived, stylized and formula-bound because it was written down from another's singing, or learned from the penny-printers. At most, considerable age, or remoteness from a single printed source, particularly in times when literacy was the exception, make for a wider diversity of the variants found for a given song strain, and they do make for a continuous polishing, as well as some distortion of the hypothetical original content, in the course of oral transmission. But the lapse of time, given either an absence of printed circulation or an independence from the rigidity of the printed word, results in the same polishing and "improvement" of a traditional text, regardless of its initial source. For example, the "Boll Weevil" has gone through precisely such polishing in the period leading to its present known versions, and in particular it had many accessions during the great depression of the I930s, long after it was known in print. It is noteworthy that just those scholars who place the most emphasis on oral sources, and regard fixation of texts by printing as a forfeiture of all claims to true art, are most apt to insist upon exact reproductions of merely incidental details, and show the least understanding of the processes of improvization and variation.

"Auld Lang Syne" is known and widely sung today only in the "doctored" version composed by Robert Burns, and this despite the fact that most people learn the text and the tune from oral sources. Is this "literary" version inferior to the original songstrain, or does it lack the traditional roots? Comparing its history with that of the literary "improvements" on the Yarrow ballads, we may well judge that there should be no objection to literary reworking of popular traditions, provided only that this be undertaken by a talented writer steeped in those traditions and at one with his people.

What happens to a "pure" or non-literate Child ballad which is itself noted down and distributed in broadside form? Is it still to be regarded as an unsullied, primary, high-caste ballad, or does it automatically sink to a "secondary" status? The Bobbing-Around Songster of I876, and Delaney's Song Book No. 18, about 1898, among others, contain texts of "Barbara Allen," which are neither more nor less garbled or altered than many obtained from oral sources, from which indeed these printed texts surely originated. How many "oral" versions still avidly collected by ballad-hunters in the United States derive from these prints? And to what extent is the prevalence of many of the Child ballads in this country explicable largely by their inclusion in early song books, not to mention the "feedback" from the more recent scholarly collections? It has been noted that designs for costumes, and even complete ritual plays, to be seen at carnival time in Trinidad, often draw their inspiration from doctoral dissertations in anthropology! Has "Barbara Allen" been reclassified of late as a "secondary" ballad, and dropped from its preferential position? Would it lose its ranking if it were found that some jobless typesetter had run off some copies in the 1670s?

We mention "Barbara Allen" because its versions are not only abundant, but show some striking uniformities. Still every discoverable text is dutifully included in collections, right down to the barely identifiable fragments. In such fashion we also find myriad bits and lines, as well as wholly independent songs, containing the "who will shoe my pretty little foot" routine. These are proudly labeled "Fair Annie of Lochroyan, Child No. 76," though they have no further connection with that ballad than a transfer of a "wandering" image. The tunes accompanying such "versions" are often weak and badly matched, and usually of recent vintage. More, the penny-sheet origin is frequently in evidence. Yet these are placed firmly in the top hierarchy of "traditional songs," and they are declared the main-stem and flower of American folksong even in regions where the predominant language is still Spanish.

In comparing the Yarrow ballads to "The Bold Soldier," we remain finally with a proper criterion of value, on both intrinsic and contextual evidence, if we disregard mere age, or "flavor," or source, or manner of their spread. For the older ballad is surely superior in its poetic integrity, its conciseness, its unity of form, its beautiful and concrete images. All these things we find, but the usual conclusions about a golden age of "pure" traditional poetry do not follow. For these formal qualities are all dependent upon the truth of the ballad's social reference, and not upon abstract unities. They stem from a realistic portrayal of a way of life, and they are designed for communication, for the enlistment of intense sympathies, and for the crystallization of attitudes. Take away this broader content, and the formal structure of the ballad is left; this is just what Scott sought to make of it, a random sequence of archaic-sounding phrases with mysterious overtones of rude times and scenes. Hints of olden beauties, no longer understood, may also constitute poetic values. But these are no longer the values of vital poetry, certainly not of popular poetry; they are the less robust values of colorful decay.

The imagery is what provides the key to the understanding and history of traditional ballad strains. Principally it is the social framework that sets the conditions of this content and simultaneously determines its form of expression. After all, the ballad theme becomes a traditional convergence of images because its human substance, joined to its poetical, and also to its musical, crystallization, is important and meaningful to people. It would seem obvious that the student of balladry ought, therefore, to begin the examination of a ballad by posing the question of its real imagery first of all.

With respect to our specific problem, illustrating a suggested improvement of method, we submit that Child's two ballads on the Yarrow theme are in fact segments and versions of a single ballad strain. We submit also that this ballad strain could not have been created by a mythical "refined" aristocracy in an era that reeked of barbarous standards such as the ballad itself describes. We submit further that, while neither a direct nor a collateral descendant of the Yarrow ballads, and while not its equal in poetic depth or in integration of its form and its content, "The Bold Soldier" is nevertheless a proper historical transformation of the earlier song as evolved by new processes in a new social framework.

Bridgeport, Connecticut
_________________________
Footnotes:

1. Norman Cazden, "The Story of a Catskill Ballad," New York Folklore Quarterly, VIII (I952), 245-266.

2 Printed versions of 'The Bold Soldier" are: Ebsworth, The Roxburghe Ballads (Hertford, I889), VI, 229-233; VII, 559-561; Journal of the Folk Song Society, I (London, i899), 108; William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Times (London, i859), I, 88-90; JAF, XXIII (191O), 447-449; [AF, XXX (1917), 363; JAF, XXXV (1922), 414; JAF, XLV (I932), 1I4-1I6; Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (New York, 19I7), pp. 161-162; Louise Pound, American Ballads and Songs (New York, 1922), pp. 68-69; John Harrington Cox, Folksongs of the South (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 375-376; Phillips Barry, et al, British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, I929), pp. 377-382; Arthur Kyle David, Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge, I929), p. 92; Helen Hartness Flanders, Vermont Folk-Songs and Ballads (Brattleboro, I931), pp. 232-233, reprinted in A Garland of Green Mountain Song (Northfield, 1934), pp. 60-6I; Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians (London, I932), I, 333-337; Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia(Toronto, 1932), pp. 25-26; Tennessee Folk Lore Society Bulletin, II (1936), 1910; Dorothy Scarborough, A Song-Catcher in the Southern Mountains (New York, I937), pp. 201-202; Mellinger E. Henry, Folk-Songs from the Southern Highlands (New York, 1938), pp. I85-186; Mary Olive Eddy, Ballads and Songs from Ohio (New York, 1939), pp. 14-I7; Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner, Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan (Ann Arbor, 1939), pp. 380-381; Paul G. Brewster, Ballads and Songs of Indiana (Bloomington, 1940), pp. 40-4I; Henry Marvin Belden, Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society (Columbia, Mo., 1940), pp. 103-104; Harold William Thompson, Body, Boots and Britches (Philadelphia and New York, I940), pp. 397-399; Vance Randolph Ozark Folksongs (Columbia, Mo., I946-1950), pp. 48-49, 303-307.