The Cambric Shirt- Peterson (NC) 1923 Brown C
[From Brown Collection of NC Folklore, Version C, a fragment. Brown's notes follow,
R. Matteson 2014]
The Elfin Knight (Child 2)
This set of courting riddles, commonly known in this country as 'The Cambric Shirt,' though not very old (the earliest text known to Child was a seventeenth-century broadside), has persisted rather well both in the old country and in America. It has been reported from tradition in Ireland, Aberdeenshire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, Sussex, Wiltshire, and Somerset, and in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina (apart from the present collection), Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Nebraska, and California.
It has two chief types of refrain, one of which, "rosemary and thyme," undergoes strange transformations on the tongues of singers — none stranger, perhaps, than the "arose Mary in time" and "Rose de Marian time" of texts A and B below. The other type, represented in text C below, seems to be only American. It is recognizable in Child's version J, which came from Massachusetts, and in texts from Maine, Vermont, Indiana, Missouri, and Texas, but I have not found it in British texts.
C. 'The Cambric Shirt.' Two stanzas only, contributed in 1923, by Mildred Peterson of Bladen county.
1. Can you make me a cambric shirt —
Flunia luna lokey slomy —
Without seam or fine needle work?
From a tastum tasalum tenipluni
Flunia luna a lokey slomy.
2 Can you wash it in a well —
Where water never run nor well's never full?