The House Carpenter- Carpenter (NC) c.1920 Brown F
[From: The Brown Collection of NC Folklore; Vol. 2; 1952. This unique short version has a floating stanza as its conclusion.
R. Matteson 2013, 2016]
40. James Harris (The Daemon Lover) Brown Collection
(Child 243)
If the various traditional versions of this ballad all go back, as Child believed, to the long-winded, pedestrian seventeenth-century broadside of 'James Harris,' they constitute something of an argument for Barry's doctrine of communal re-creation. For its range as traditional song, see BSM 79, and add New Hampshire (NGMS 95-7), Tennessee (SFLQ xi 127-8), North Carolina (FSRA 38-40), Florida (SFLQ viii 160-1), the Ozarks (OFS I 166-76), Ohio (BSO 70-7), Indiana (BSI 136-48, JAFL lvii 14-15), Illinois (JAFL LX 131-2), Michigan (BSSM 54-8), and Wisconsin (JAFL LIT 46-7, originally from Kentucky). Few regional collections made in this country fail to record it ; [1] it is therefore surprising that Child knew, apparently, only one American text and that a fragment. It is almost always called in America 'The House Carpenter.' The notion that the lover from the sea is a revenant or a demon, present in the original broadside and less definitely in some of the other versions in Child, has faded from most American texts; with us it is a merely domestic tragedy. And perhaps for that very reason it is one of the favorites of American ballad singers. There are some fourteen texts in the North Carolina collection, most of them holding pretty closely to one version. A full text of this version is given first and most of the others described by reference to this.
Footnote for above:
1. There are traces of it in our K and M versions.
F. 'The House Carpenter.' Collected by D. W. Fletcher of Trinity College some ten miles east of Durham from A. H. Carpenter, who learned it from his father. The text is short (eight stanzas) and varies a good deal from the normal as exhibited in A. Note particularly the confusion of grammatical person in the first two stanzas. Because of this confusion quotation marks are not used until line 7.
1 I once could have married the Queen's daughter dear,
When she looked most beautiful, wise, and sweet ;
But she went away with a house carpenter
And there she stayed three weeks.
2 There came along a very rich man.
He was richer than tongue could tell.
'Will you forsake your house carpenter
And come with this young man?'
3 'I will forsake my house carpenter.
And I will forsake my land.
And I will forsake my pretty little babe
And come with this young man.'
4 They went along till they came to the old sea sound
Where she looked wonderful wide and deep.
There she wipeth up her water-weeping eyes
And then began to weep.
5 'What are you weeping for?' said he.
'Are you weeping for my gold?
Or are you weeping for your house carpenter
Which I know you never shall see?'
6 'I am neither weeping for your gold
Nor for my house carpenter.
I am weeping for my pretty little babe
Which I know I never shall see.'
7 They had not been gone more than three weeks.
I'm sure it was not four,
When there sprang a leak in the bottom of the ship
And they sank to rise no more.
8 I've often seen green grass trod under foot;
It would spring and grow again.
True love, true love, 'tis a killing pain.
Did you ever feel that pain?