The Cruel Mother- McAllister (VA) 1935 Wilkinson
[From Bronson no. 38, taken from Wilkinson's notebook.
I'm sure Lucy McAllister, the informant, is related to Marybird McAllister who did dozens of interviews with George Foss. Marybird had a sister named Lucy but I'm not sure if it's her. This version is from an area of Virginia which became the repository for ballads- at least three versions were collected in this area.
George Foss, who wrote an excellent article titled, From White Hall to Bacon Hollow, collected ballads in this area. Here are some excerpts:
R. Matteson 2014]
From White Hall to Bacon Hollow is about a place and about its culture and people. I have granted myself the author's indulgence of selecting a title significant in its double meaning. White Hall to Bacon Hollow is a stretch of twisting country road, Virginia route 810, crossing the line between Albemarle and Greene Counties.
The earliest settlers of importance to the area were members of the Brown family. The patriarch of the Virginia Browns was Benjamin Brown, who began acquiring land in Albemarle County in 1747. He amassed six thousand acres of what was to become known as Brown's Cove. Included in these holdings was a tract patented to him by King George III in 1750.
It is of importance at this point to mention Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., who was a collector of ballads and folksongs specifically of Virginia. He was not a collector in the same sense as Sharp, that is a field worker and face-to-face gatherer of songs. He was more in the mold of Francis James Child, the great collector-editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, that is, he served to gather and organize, to sift and evaluate the field work of numerous amateur, hobbyist and professional collectors. As early as 1929 he produced Traditional Ballads of Virginia; in 1949 he published Folksongs of Virginia and More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, all three under the auspices of the Virginia Folklore Society. A courtly gentleman “of the old school,” he was professor of English literature at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a great span of time. It was professor Davis who was Paul Clayton Worthington's teacher at the University during the 1950's and inspired Paul's interest in balladry and folksong.
Two later collectors who visited and worked in the White Hall-Bacon Hollow area were Richard Chase and professor Winston Wilkinson whose manuscripts are now kept by the University of Virginia. They were the first collectors to record the songs of some of the finest singers in the region, Ella Shiflett and Victoria Shiflett Morris as early as 1935.
Some of the family names still found in northwest Albemarle County and Greene County date from pre-Revolutionary times: Brown, Frazier and Jones. Other names commonly found are Walton, Powell, Sandridge and Wood. But by far the most commonly found are Morris and Shiflett. This makes the tracing of relationships very difficult since various branches of the family are only very distantly related but share the same name. Robert Shiflett (designated “Raz's Robert,” i.e. Erasmus' son Robert, to distinguish him from the region's numerous other Robert Shifletts) speculates that the family was originally descended from French mercenaries brought over by Lafayette to aid the colonies in their War of Independence.
Marybird McAllister served as my initial point of contact and the focal point of my interest during my first trips into the Brown's Cove area. She is the archetypal mountain woman. Her age (“I'm the oldest one in Brown's Cove.”) and life story have combined to make her almost an anachronism, the last of a species on the verge of extinction. Marybird could neither read nor write. (“Ma and Pap never sent me to school. I wish they had of. I know I could of learnt.”) She was married at fourteen and bore eight children. She was forced to care for her children alone for a long period during the absence of her husband, Lem. She carried in her mind a large repertoire of songs which she constantly added to, and she never grew tired of singing, playing her banjo or listening to others make music.
[The Cruel Mother] - Sung by Mrs. Lucy McAllister, Harriston, Va., October 9, 1935. Wilkinson MSS., 1935-36, p. 30(B).
1. She loved him up and she loved him down,
Lil, O Lily in the lowly.
She loved him till he filled her arms,
Down by the greenwood siding.
2. She placed her foot against an oak,
First it bent and then it broke.
3. She placed herself against a thorn,
And there's where those babes were born.
4. When she was sitting in her father's hall,
She spied those little babes a-playing ball.
5. O little babes if you were mine,
I'd dress you up in silks so fine.
6. O mother, O mother, when we were born,
You never dressed me in coarse nor fine.
7. Now we're in Heaven a-doing well,
Your redeemer is down in hell.