The House Carpenter- York (NC) 1939 Brown 4K
[Designated Brown 4K. From The Brown Collection of NC Folklore, Volume 4, 1957. Notes from Volume 2 follow.
Another version L, 'House Carpenter' was taken from her husband James York, Olin, Iredell county, in 1939. His version is ten stanzas, fairly close to A but shifting in stanza 7 from the third person of the lover to the first person. It's unclear if the York versions are the same.
There is a recording of Mrs. York in the Abrams Collection singing two stanzas. It's titled, The House Carpenter, the second variant. and was recorded with guitar accompaniment by Abrams at the Bland Hotel c. 1939: http://omeka.library.appstate.edu/items/show/18861
For additional text see Brown L, Mr. York's version.
R. Matteson 2013, 2016]
40. James Harris (The Daemon Lover) Brown Collection (Vol. 2)
(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.
K. 'The House Carpenter.' Sung by Mrs. James York. Recorded at Olin, Iredell county, in 1939. The portamenti are primitive indeed; the Negro influence is quite evident in the flattened third and seventh.
Scale: Mixolydian, plagal. Tonal Center: f. Structure: abac (2,2,2,2) = aa1 (4.4).