The Cambric Shirt- from an old Negro woman (VA) 1915 Davis CC
[From More Traditional Ballads of Virginia- Davis 1960. Davis made it his mission to find versions of Child 2 since in his first book TBVa- 1929, none were collected. An excerpt of Davis' notes follow:
R. Matteson 2014]
Coffin notes that "in this country, the elf, an interloper in Britain, has been universaily rationalized, to a mortal lover. Frequently, nothing remains but the riddle, sometimes even the love affair being absent." This seems to be the case also with texts recently collected from oral tradition in Britain. The ballad in its modified form has been found in Ireland, Aberdeenshire, Northumberland, Yorkshire, Wilkshire, Sussex, and Somerset, and in this country from Maine to Florida, Texas to California. With its wide popularity, it is curious that the ballad has not been more often found in Virginia. No texts of this ballad appear in TBVa. At present, three versions from three singers have been recovered. All are fragmentary, but all preserve to some extent the love element of the tasks. The refrain lines indicate the usual deviation, from such lines as "Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" of Child G. Wimberly suggests, "The plant refrain in The Elfin, Knight (2G), is a very probable survival of an incantation used against the demon suitor." See Wimberly, pp. 345-62, for a "general discussion of name magic, verbal charms, and herbal magic."
The meager recording of this ballad in Virginia- no record in TBVa, and only the three incomplete texts here without tunes are all the more remarkable in view of the twenty texts printed by child and the no less than fifty-five tunes (and texts) printed by Bronson (I, 9-33) .
Bronson divides his musical records into three main groups: Group A, with six variants surviving from Scotland, New England, and Texas; Group B, the sturdiest branch with forty representatives, all having the "True Lover of Mine" refrain; and Group C, with only five variants, wholly English and with the "Acre of Land" and "Ivy" refrain. Since Bronson's classifications are based primarily on musical considerations, it is impossible to relate the three tuneless fragments here to his groups. On the basis of the refrains, however, they would seem to lie closest to his large middle group B. But what Bronson says of his third group, C, is certainly true of all three of the fragments given here: "So far as concerns the words," he says, "this group has pretty completely descended to the nursery: the riddles have lost their dramatic function, and the story is a straight-forward recounting of impossibles, with no challenging from opponents. Here there is little to bolster a theory of evolution from simple to complex." Only CC has the lady reply to the gentleman with a series of tasks actually impossible. The three fragments given below are at least proof that the ballad, apparently more vigorous elsewhere in Britain and in America, especially in New England, is by no means extinct in Virginia.
CC. "The Cambric Shirt." Collected by Miss Corita Sloane, of Merryfield, Va. Learned from an old Negro woman in Fairfax county, January 10, 1915. The manuscript presents the ballad divided into two stanzas of seven lines each, and although several possibilities of more usual divisions are apparent, it has been thought best to retain this unusual but consistent manuscript presentation.
1. "Carry a lady a letter from me
And tell her to make a fine cambric shirt
With nary a stitch in nor nary a stitch out.
wash it in yonder wet where never a drop of rain fell,
Iron it all over with a cold flint stone,
And put a gloss on it for me to be married in,
And I'll be a true lover of hers."
2. "Now carry that gent a letter from me
And tell him to buy me an acre of ground
'Twixt the salt sea and the shore side,
Plow it all over with an old cow's horn
Plant it all over with one grain of corn
And raise a barrel of coin for me,
And he can be a true lover of mine."