The House Carpenter- Corum (NC) 1915 Brown E
[From The Brown Collection of NC Folklore, 1952; Vol. 2. Their notes follow. This version's opening stanza is unusual but nearly identical to the version by D. C. Michael, who learned it from a schoolmate about 1900. It was sung by his daughter Cloe Michael in 1939 and appears in Brown, Volume 4 as the E version (4E).
Thomas Smith's contributions must be scrutinized because of some questionable contribution to the Brown Collection and especially his later contributions (with his brother) to Davis' "More Traditional Ballads of Virginia" (1960) which are obvious and proven ballad recreations. This particular ballad doesn't send up any red flags- I'm not sure when the Michael ballad was submitted- but I assume it was probably in the late 1930s by Cloe.
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.
E. 'The House Carpenter.' Another text secured by Thomas Smith, "sung by Clyde Corum of Zionville, March 22, 1915. Clyde Corum learned it, he says, from his mother and grandfather, who sang the song to him when he was a child." The text is the same as A with minor verbal variations, except that it lacks stanza 8 of A and has a different opening stanza (which appears also in other ballads):
'I will come in but I won't set down,
For I have not a moment of time;
For I heard you were engaged to another young man
And your heart is no longer mine.'