The Cruel Mother- Martin (KY) 1905 JFFS; Bronson 36
[Not a local title. Single stanza with music published in Journal of the Folk-Song Society, Volume 2, Issues 6-9; by Folk-Song Society (Great Britain) 1906. Notes by Lucy Broadwood follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
Lucy Broadwood:
Miss Esther White, who communicates this song, writes that Mrs. A. R. Martin learned it as a child from the singing of her great-aunt, and that "lately she heard it, sung by a poor 'mountain white' child in the North Carolina Mountains." Mrs. Martin was unable to send more than the verse here printed. It corresponds most closely with one in a version quoted by Child from the " Motherwell MS." and which Motherwell "noted from Agnes Laird, Kilbarchan, in 1S25."
Mrs. Martin's tune should be compared with that of "Brave Earl Brand" in Reay and Stokoe's Songs of Northern England, and "Hynde Home" in Motherwell's Minstrelsy.
[The Cruel Mother]- Sung by Mrs. A. R. Martin, Anchorage, KY 1905. Supplied by Esther White, JFSS, II (1905), p. 109.
"My dear little children, if you were mine,
All alone, and aloney O!
I'd dress you up in silk so fine
Down by the green-woody sidev, O!"