"The Lady and the Dragoon": A Broadside Ballad in Oral Tradition
by David Mason Greene
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 70, No. 277 (Jul. - Sep., 1957), pp. 221-230
[Barely proofed,
R. Matteson 2018]
"THE LADY AND THE DRAGOON": A BROADSIDE BALLAD IN ORAL TRADITION
BY DAVID MASON GREENE
OF the traditional ballad which Cecil Sharp designated as "The Lady and the Dragoon," the headnote to its versions in The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (Durham, 1952), II, 287,says: " This old broadside ballad-it goes back at least to the seventeenth century-bears some resemblance in its central shape to 'Earl Brand' (Child 7) and 'Erlinton' (Child 8)." Phillips Barry also notes the resemblance to "Erlinton," and remarks that the ballad is somehow derived from the seventeenth-century broadside "The Master-Piece of Love Songs"; Arthur K. Davis, Jr., lists his Virginia variant in an appendix to "Earl Brand"; Mary 0. Eddy places her three Ohio versions under the title of "Erlinton"; and, finally, Barry remarks in a later writing "The tragic [sic] old ballad of 'Erlinton' seems to have left a successor in this humorous song[1]."
The purpose of the present study is twofold. First,it means to demonstrate that the differences between this ballad as it is presently sung by the folk and its seventeenth century broadside ancestors a re basically due to purposeful reshapings by Grub Street, rather than to any accident of oral transmission. Second, it intends to show that if the ballad is related to the ballads of the "Earl Brand" family, such relationship is the result o f conscious imitation and not that of traditional variation.
The earliest known broadside versions of our ballad are "The Master-Piece of Love-Songs"and "The Seaman's Renown,"one of which is quite obviously patterned after the other[2]. Neither bears any of the earmarks of traditional narrative verse, nor
anything to set it apart stylistically from many another lamp-scented broadside of its time. "The Master-Piece" consists o f sixteen four-line stanzas, each composed of three rhyming four-stress lines, plus a final non-rhyming three-stress line. "The Seaman's Renown" tells precisely the same story (except that the hero is a sailor rather than a gamekeeper) in precisely the same sort of verse and in virtually the same words; however, it lacks one stanza of the other ballad (the thirteenth), and adds five new ones. Metrically, the verse is frequently forced, and often impossible, though in each version some lines are considerably better in this sense than their parallels in the other. Both texts are full of gaucheries-inversions, cliches, inept religious and mythological allusions, and the like. Finally, the narratives themselves are wretchedly constructed; furthermore, they have little of the timeless or classless appeal of traditional ballad stories, but seem expressly designed to open the purses of a worldly servant class which might well be titillated by seeing its own daydreams o f wealth, position, and equality fulfilled in such quasi-realistic tales of somewhat brutally achieved social climbing.
The story dealt with by both broadsides falls into two parts. After an introductory stanza in each case, there ensues a long dialogue between the hero and the lady (nine Journal of American Folklore stanzas in "The Master-Piece," eleven in "The Seaman's Renown"). In the course of this colloquy, the latter protests at considerable length that she cannot marry beneath
her station, while the former argues for natural equality. When he melodramatically
threatens suicide, and in the next breath hints that he is actually of gentle birth, the
lady agrees to marry him, even though she knows that her father will object most
strenuously. This terminates the first section of the ballad. What follows is a third person narrative, with interspersed dialogue, which records the elopement, the encounter with the father (he accompanied by six gentlemen in "The Master-Piece," but
alone in "The Seaman's Renown"), the father's threat to the hero, the latter's acceptance of the challenge, his victory, and the father's forced acknowledgment of him as son-in-law and heir. "The Seaman's Renown" concludes with three additional stanzas full of reconciliation, sweetness, and light.
It has been generally supposed that "The Master-Piece of Love-Songs" sired the other broadside. Though there is no certain proof at hand, all indications are that the reverse is true. In the first place, it is unlikely that either ballad appeared before 1675. Both stipulate that they are to be sung to the tune of "A Week before Easter." I can find no trace of a broadside bearing this name, but the words are those of the opening line of "The Forlorne Lover" which was first registered with the Stationers' Company on 1 March I675 and of which all extant copies note that it is to be sung "to its own tune."[3] Secondly, no entry appears in the Stationers' Register for either of our broadsides. Since virtually no ballads were recorded therein after 1676 (though quantities were published), this, too, seems to argue a fairly late date for the two in question.
The two unique versions of "The Seaman's Renown" in the Roxburghe Collection are both in black-letter; both were published by William Thackeray, one in association with T. Passenger and W. Whitwood, the other with Coles, Vere, Wright, Clark, and Passenger. Inasmuch as William Thackeray, with various partners, was in business from 1664 to 1692, Ebsworth's date of I679 for the earliest of these copies does not seem unreasonable (see Roxburghe Ballads, p. 561).
Of the seven extant copies of "The Master-Piece of Love-Songs," Ebsworth notes that those in the Bagford, Euing, and British Museum collections are black-letter versions, apparently implying that the other four are in white-letter, which would indicate in all probability that the latter are later printings. Furthermore, the blackletter copies all come from the press of A. Milburne, W. Onnley, and Thomas Thackeray. The latter, who appears to have been the son of William Thackeray, is not known to have published anything before 1693, at which time the imprint of the above partnership appeared in a chapbook. (Since William Thackeray is not heard of after 1692, it is highly probable that Thomas took over his print shop and stock.) Therefore, all indications are that "The Master-Piece" is the later work, which gives some credibility to Ebsworth's unsubstantiated assumption that "The Seaman's Renown" was authored by Joseph Martin, who also produced "The Seaman's Folly" (Roxburghe, p. 561), since, if the nautical ballad was actually the later of the two, Martin's position would have merely been that of reviser rather than creator.
As far as I have been able to ascertain, no more versions of our ballad are traceable, either in broadside or folksong form, until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. At that time Nathaniel Coverly, Jr., of Boston, who was in business from 1806 to 1819, published a broad-sheet containing a humorous song called "Sweet Pig of Richmond Hill" and a ballad entitled "The Bold Soldier,"the unique remaining copy of which is now in the Isaiah Thomas Collection in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester Massachusetts. The story told by Coverly's ballad is patently the same as that of the seventeenth-century broadsides. The details, with one exception,[4] and as much of the language as the altered verse form will allow, are,
however, those of "The Master-Piece" rather than those of "The Seaman's Renown," but the form of presentation is much modified. The text now consists of nine stanzas of four-stress verse, each made up of a pair of closed couplets,i n conformity with common eighteenth-century poetic practice. The opening stanza again supplies the exposition, though somewhat differently from those of its forebears. Nothing remains of the long dialogue on social equality and noble parentage. The motivation for the father's expected wrath is no longer that he is of high rank, but simply that he is "cruel." The hero, as is suggested by the title, has now become a soldier. As in the earlier texts, the couple elope, and meet the father on their return from church; somewhere in the course of a century or so he has picked up an extra retainer, his henchmen now numbering seven. In this new version, his taunts and threats are directed at his daughter, not her spouse. The latter, like his seventeenth-century ancestors, voices his resentment and dismounts from his horse, leaving that animal in the lady's charge (a fact which is not noted in "The Seaman's Renown"). In a stanza which is only implied in "The Master-Piece," he puts the retainers to rout; then, as before, he agrees to the father's surrender o n condition that the marriage be recognized and that all the old man's property be bestowed upon the lady. The two final stanzas are new; their main business is to extol soldiers in general for their many virtues, and especially for their willingness to fight for both love and liberty.
I have been unable to locate any other printings of this ballad in this form, though the indications are very strong that Coverly was not its only purveyor. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, however, at least forty versions of it have been collected from the American folk, either from singing or from manuscript "ballet" books, one or two of which date back to the Civil War or earlier. Of this number, eight have been found in North Carolina, seven in Virginia, four in Ohio, two in Maine, two in Vermont, and one each in West Virginia, Massachusetts, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, New Jersey, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Indiana. Most of these were recorded between 1910 and 1920, but versions have continued to be picked up to so late a date as 1945.
The most noteworthy fact about all of these American traditional variants is that they resemble the Coverly broadside very closely-far more closely than it resembles its British ancestors o f the seventeenth century. Two of them (JAF-A and BBM-A)5
preserve all nine stanzas intact, with only minor changes of words and word order here and there.A ll of the other northeastern versions, as well as Davis' Virginia text and the Michigan copy, show little variation other than the loss of lines and stanzas.
The remainder give us the ballad i n various stages of disintegration and confusion, but all of them, even the one-stanza fragments, a, requite unmistakably children of the same blood.
There is practically no evidence of creative addition in these traditional variants, and virtually none of any significance. The two texts which contain the most new material (OF-C and OF-D) are actually, as nearly as one can make out, muddled amalgams of this ballad and some other; indeed, the second of these can only be classed as related to "The Lady and the Dragoon" tradition out of courtesy, so little of the story does it contain. The North Carolina "Yankee Soldier" text (NCF-C), whose anomalous second stanza
"Lilly Margaret, daughter, my word you'd better mind.
I'll shut you in a cave, your body I'll confine."
"O father, cruel father, my body you can confine,
But you can't put the Yankee soldier from out my mind"
awakes dim echoes of the opening lines of Child's 8A and 8B,6 seems to be a product of purposeful change to fit a local situation. What few other additions occur, excepting three which will be discussed later, seem to have had no effect on tradition. Briefly, they include the following:
1. JAF-D: second and third stanzas are made up of lines from NC2,7 plus lines echoed from elsewhere in the text; its two final lines, replacing NC8:3-4, "Saying here is a soldier that guardeth not his life / For he faught seven armed men for his true loving wife" are anomalous, though the rhyme is borrowed from lines 7-8 (=NC2:i-2).
2. TBV: the two-line seventh stanza is in obvious imitation of the fifth's second couplet (NC6:3-4).
3. GGMS: third stanza made up of echoes of other lines, plus an anomalous second line, "As we are on our honeymoon, this insult is a shame."
4. FSSA-F: fifth (short-line, two-stress) stanza imitative of the sixth (NC3:1-2). Ninth stanza, inserted between NC5:I-2 and NC5:3-4, peculiar to this text, reads:
"See here, my little Duel
You bring my daughter so low,
For to marry a soldier
And he's so poor."
This is reminiscent of the dialogue of the early broadsides, and also of the English traditional variants to be discussed later. Probably, however, the second pair of lines come from a forgotten NC9:I, and the first pair have simply been created to supply the rhyme ("poor" being "po'" in Southern dialect).
5. JAF-C: fifth (short-line) stanza is anomalous; it reads
She jumped on a milk-white steed
And he jumped on another one;
Off to church they rode
Just like a sister and brother.
This has possibly been picked up from a version of "Earl Brand," but it is more likely simply the adoption of a formula to supply consecutive action.
6. FSRA-B: third (short-line) stanza reads
It was down in the garden
Some flowers for to see;
Well, says the soldier,
My mind is to marry thee.
This does not make too much sense in context, and has probably crept in from another ballad, perhaps a version of "The Nightingale," another "soldier" story.
7. BSI replaces NC5:I-2 with lines imitative of the last couplet of its second stanza (NC4:1-2). The second line of the sixth stanza, following NC7:4 is peculiar to this text:
"My daughter and my fortune, let it be great or small."
8. FSSA-B has several anomalous lines. The third line of stanza one, "The lady loved the soldier because he is poor," has apparently been contaminated by a lost NC9:I, resulting in the rhyme line, "Before all the gentlemen her soldier goes before." The next two lines, "She wrote him a letter was quickly sent by hand. / No quicker than he got it, to me he returned," may come from another ballad (cf. OF-C, OF-D). The opening couplet of the third stanza, replacing NC2:3-4, is anomalous: "O lady, O lady, the soldier is supplied, / And this night I'll marry you if you will be my bride." Possibly this is a result of a sensed need for a reply to the lady's remark that she "would be a soldier's wife," though it may arise from a refashioning of the line around "bride" replacing the misunderstood rhyme-word "betide" of the original.
None of these variations seem to have carried farther than the unique versions in which they have been noted here. However, there are three additions to this ballad, noted above, which seem to have genuine traditional significance, in that they reappear
in a number of variants. They include the following:
1. A couplet which usually replaces NC8:3-4, and which reads typically in FSS: "They mounted their horses and off they did ride, / A fine weddin' supper for them they did pervide." The keynote of this couplet is the wedding supper, which also appears in TBV, UMS, and NCF-C. Whence it derives is uncertain; it may be a genuine folk-creation, or it may be borrowed from other ballads in which a similar situation occurs, or it may simply be descended from some printed text parallel to, but not identical with, Coverly's.
2. A "come-all-ye"li ne which begins the final stanza of eleven widely-scattered versions (BSSM, BSO-A, BSO-B, BSO-C, OF-A, OF-B, FSS, JAF-C, FSRA-B, SBNS, and NCF-B). Where it appears, NC9:i becomes the second line of the stanza, and NC9:2 drops out. To be sure, the attention-getting formula, though not common in the ballads of the Child canon, is a traditional device, and in its "come-all-ye" form has been reinforced among the folk by reason of its frequent use in broadside-sired songs; but the position of the instance in question at the very end of the ballad makes it hard to believe that it can have
been the result of spontaneous adoption of such a formula. Again, we are prompted to postulate origin in a lost printed text. It should be noted that a similar line is common in English traditional variants of this ballad, of which more later.
3. A double variant of NC7:I-2, which appears in five versions (OF-B, UMS, JAF-C, BSO-B,a nd BSO-C). One variant always preserves the rhyme-sound of the Coverly lines- "cold" ("bold") and "gold"-whereas the other follows a pattern exemplified by that of UMS: "Come, stop," said the old man, "and do but spare my life, / And you shall have my daughter all for your wedded wife." In those ballads where only a single version of the lines occurs, the first pattern (Coverly's) is by far the most common. However, GGMS has: "O, then speaks up the old man, saying, If you'll only spare my life, / I'll give you ten thousand pounds and my daughter for your wife." The versions with the double variant, therefore, may represent the crossing of two traditions, again possibly descended from different printings.
In spite of these additions, the process of accretion in this ballad is far less noticeable than that of disintegration. As noted above, only two versions contain parallels to the full Coverly text, whereas eight, or twenty per cent of the total, are fragments of six lines or less. In the remainder, the eighth stanza-and particularly its second couplet- is most frequently lacking, with the ninth running a close second, perhaps indicatingthat the folk do not take too kindly to moralizing endings for narrative songs.
The first, or summary, stanza, and the fifth, sixth, and seventh, which describe the battle and contain the meat of the action, are the ones most frequently retained, with the sixth appearing, curiously, more often than any of the others.
Of the individual lines preserved, many show a startling fidelity to their predecessors in the Coverly ballads. Of these, the most striking is NC5:4 ("The lady held the horse while the soldier f ought the battle") which not only occurs more frequently than
any other line (thirty-one times in forty versions), but which also shows the least number of changes, and those very minor. (The most drastic is "The lady held her breath,"e tc. in FSS). Almost equally stable are NCI:4, NC5:3, and NC7:2-3. A ll of
stanzas eight and nine are quite constant, where they appear, but, as noted above, they are usually lost, either in part or in toto. This, however, is not to imply that many other lines show any really significant variation. For example, t he main differences in the various versions o f NC1:3 rest simply in the substitution of "riches" or "portion" (the latter obviously borrowed from NC7:3) for "fortune." Similarly, in NC2:3 the changes occur only in the two verbs, "drew," f or example, replacing "took" in fifteen out of twenty-two versions. In the same way, in NC5:3, "caused" takes the place of "made" in twenty-three out of thirty versions. Indeed, the most noticeable internal changes in the folk-texts have only to do with word-substitution or rearrangements of word order.
In the few lines where really sweeping changes occur throughout the American traditional variants of the ballad, one of two forces appears to be in operation. The first seems to be the unintelligibility o r non-acceptability of a phrase or a word-particularly a rhyme-word-to the singer. Thus, for example, the rhyme-word "betide" in NC2:4 gives trouble in a number of instances, so that it appears as "be tried" in four versions," provide"in another, and, in two others," bride," which last necessitates almost complete revision of the line to make sense. Even more perplexing seems to have been "amain" in NC6:2, with the result that in many variants the soldier runs his adversary through "the main"; w hat were probably attempts to render the latter word intelligible have resulted in the substitution of "brain" in several instances, and even "maid" in one. The awkward and rather meaningless NC4:2-"Is this your behavior? Is this your merry day?"-is very unstable, and in the total view breaks
down into a patternless chaos, which seems to have eventuated from individual attempts to make the line more meaningful. As much can be said for NC5:2, whose revisions are frequently more senseless than the prototype.
On the other hand, certain internal variations, because they appear almost universally, may point back to some widely-circulated printing analogous t o Coverly's. For example, in twenty-five out of thirty versions NC6:2 reads: "The next one he came to, he served him the same."Now, "served" used in this sense is not a particularly common word-at least not so common, I think, that it would tend to be adopted spontaneously merely on the strength of oral transmission by eighty-five percent of
the singers of this song. Hence, we may guess that the passage in our hypothetical ur-text read something like this: "The first one he came to, he ran him through amain, / The next one he came to, he served him the same." Despite the assonance,
this is really a better reading than Coverly's, since it obviates the repetition of "slain" in the rhyme-pattern of the stanza.
I think that we may also attribute the common "don't carry on so bold" pattern of variants of NC7:I to another text, inasmuch as there seems to be no sound reason why "you make my blood run cold "should not otherwise have been retained. However,
this phrase may simply represent a general carrying-over of the "bold" rhyme of NC1:4. The frequent substitution of "store" f or Coverly's rhyme-word "fair" in NC1:2 is more puzzling, especially as nine other substitute rhymes also appear. To be
sure," fair" was hardly a good rhyme for "war"(except possibly i n Bostonian dialect), but the folk are not usually so nice in their acceptance and rejection of rhymes.
For all of the minor internal changes, and for all the random additions and depletions, the significant thing about all this, it seems to me, is that it shows a ballad, apparently at the mercy of oral transmission for close to a hundred and fifty years,
continuing i n the main to adheres lavishly t o a known printed prototype. That Coverly's broadsheet fathered all the American folk variants is, of course, unlikely; the product o f a small Boston printshop can hardly be expected to have travelled so far as
Louisiana, or to the remote hamlets of the Appalachians-- thought he indications are strong that it was the ancestor of most, if not all, of the northeastern versions. The strongest likelihood seems to be that an indeterminate number of printed texts, differing from Coverly's and from each other only slightly, enjoyed wide distribution throughout eastern North America.
Apparently, however, Coverly's text of this ballad and whatever parallels to it were circulated in America did not spring full-blown directly from "The Master-Piece of Love-Songs."A glance a t the eight variants taken from oral tradition i n England w ill, I think, tend to substantiate this view. These versions h ave a number of significant likenesses to the Coverly b roadside, and to the traditional American variants. First of all, they are cast in precisely t he same verse form. Two of them (SMS-A nd SMS-B) have introductory stanzas not terribly unlike that of the Boston b roadside, though in each case the lines have been rather badly garbled. More importantly, the less fragmentary versions have stanzas almost identical to NC3, NC5, and NC7, as well as a couplet in the final stanza like the first couplet of the final stanza of those American variants with the "come-all-ye" line. But the points in which the English and American traditions differ are even more interesting than their points of similarity. First of all, the English variants contain two stanzas near their beginnings which do not occur in their American analogues and which relate directly back to the opening dialogue of "The Master-Piece." As exemplified in FUT, they read:
"My father is a lord, a lord o f high renown
Andi f I should wed a soldier t hat would pull his honor down;
So its your birth and my birth that never will agree,
So take it as a warning, bold Dragoon," said she.
"No warning, no warning I never meant o take,
I'll either wed or die, love, all for your sweet sake."
And when he spoke these words it made the lady's heart bleed.
To church they both went and were married with speed.
In other words, the motivation for the father's anger is once again the soiling of his honor. Furthermore, the final couplet of these British versions-"Although he's so poor, he will fight for the crown- / Here's a health to King George and his jolly
dragoon," would almost necessarily have had to be revised or dropped from a post-Revolutionary American ballad, as Coverly's dates indicate" The Bold Soldier"t o have been.
It seems to me that we must assume, therefore, that the British form of this ballad was the earlier of the two. In its entirety (probably seven stanzas), for one thing, it corresponds with "The Master-Piece of Love-Songs," except for the matter of the toast a t the end, which suggests that it emanates from a period of patriotic fervor and nationalism. For another, i ts soldier i s invariably a dragoon, a species o f military man whose greatest prominence was in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, such rhymes as "crown" or "own" with "dragoon" may argue for composition at a time when these sounds had not progressed to their present-day pronunciation. That the hypothetical British prototype of the folk versions (probably a broadside) was composed, and that the folk versions did not evolve from "The Master-Piece" by some shaping by oral tradition, can hardly be questioned. In the first place, the closed couplets, as we have noted before, can only be the work of an educated poet of sorts; more importantly, unless we are to take it that the molding forces of oral tradition have died in the past century or so, there is no reason to believe that their operation should have so drastically changed the seventeenth-century broadside in what can have been considerably less than a hundred years, when they have affected the later (Coverly) broadside version virtually not at all in a hundred and fifty.
For similar reasons, it is fairly certain that the American broadside was patterned after our conjectural British one by some penny-wise poetaster. The two stanzas concerning the differences of social station were removed and replaced by one which lays the motivation for the elopement to the father's cruelty, because obviously they would have had no appeal for an audience in the young American republic. Likewise, the references to king and crown were eradicated, and liberty was made the thing which the soldier championed. Finally, in order to strengthen the narrative, apparently the author (or reviser) added NC4, NC6, and NC8, which had no parallels in the earlier versions.
Having traced the pattern of descent of the American and English ballads of this family, it is possible to state categorically that they cannot possibly be considered offspring of "Erlinton," "Earl Brand," or "The Douglas Tragedy" via any process of oral tradition. Whether the original seventeenth-century broadside was patterned after one of these folk ballads is a highly debatable point. If, as it seems to have been, "The Seaman's Renown" was the original broadside, the relationship appears quite unlikely. The points which it has in common with the traditional ballads are few more than those of flight, pursuit, battle, and-in the case of "Erlinton" only-unqualified victory for the hero. That the father's unconditional surrender bears some resemblance to a similar situation in the "Robin Hood" variant of "Erlinton" found in Child is, I believe, unimportant. The latter work, purportedly a nineteenth-century copy of a seventeenth-century text, which has never been tracked down, is highly suspect, especially since it was "discovered" by J. Payne Collier.
"The Master-Piece of Love-Songs" has two or three points in common with the traditional ballads, which may be significant. Briefly, they are the father's accompaniment by retainers, the lady's holding of the horse, and the keeper's battle against odds.
Two out of three of these matters may simply represent improvised additions for purposes of heightening the drama, while the business of the horse would hardly be unusual in an equestrian age. However, taken together, these changes, along with the
fact that the keeper has a sword and buckler where the sailor had a sword and pistol, certainly suggest that the reviser (or author) had some knowledge of the traditional pattern. In the event that he did, the likelihood seems greater that he would have added these matters rather than subtracted them; if he did not, it strikes me that coincidence was stretched considerably whichever way the operation went. In any case, their lack in "The Seaman's Renown" and their presence in "The Master-Piece" and subsequent folk-versions argue for the latter broadside's having been the later one.
In summation, we may then postulate the following hypotheses: (I) "The Seaman's Renown" was the progenitor of the "Lady and the Dragoon" tradition, but itself had virtually no effect on the ballad as it appears among the folk; (2) "The Seaman's Renown" probably has no connection with the traditional ballads of the "Earl Brand" type; (3) "The Master-Piece of Love-Songs" represents a re-working of "The Seaman's Renown," with possible additions from the "Earl Brand" tradition; (4) the ballads of the "Lady and the Dragoon" type, taken from oral tradition in England, represent an eighteenth-century broadside, now lost, which was a re-working of "The Master-Piece of Love-Songs"; (5) the variety of American broadside exemplified by Coverly's "Bold Soldier" represents a Revolutionary or post-Revolutionary re-working of the lost English broadside, with additions composed by the reviser; (6) all versions of this ballad taken from oral tradition in America spring directly from broadsides of the Coverly type.
NOTES
1 See, respectively, Barry, "A Garland of Ballads," JAF, XXIII (1910), 447; Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), p. 92; Eddy, Ballads and Songs from Ohio (New York, n.d.), pp. 14-15; Barry, et al., British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, 1929), p. 382.
2 See The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. J. W. Ebsworth (London, 1887), VII:I7, 230-231, and (1893), VII:22, 559-561.
3 E. Hyder Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries in the Registers of the Company
of Stationers in London (Chapel Hill, I924), p. 83, no. 907.
4In "The Seaman's Renown" the hero draws "sword and pistol," which also appear in the
Coverly broadside, rather than the "sword and buckler" of 'The Master-Piece."
5 These, and all subsequent references unless otherwise noted, will be found in the following
Key to Abbreviations, which gives full source as well as place of origin of variant: ABS-Louise
Pound, American Ballads and Songs (New York, 1922), p. 68-Louisiana; BBM-A-Phillips
Barry, British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, I929), p. 377-Maine; BBM-B-Barry, p. 378-
Maine; BBM-C-Barry, p. 379-Massachusetts; BM-X-Barry, p. 380-new Brunswick; BSIPaul
G. Brewster, Ballads and Songs of Indiana (Bloomington, I940), p. 7o-Indiana; BSO-A,
B, C-Mary O. Eddy, Ballads and Songs from Ohio (New York, n.d.), pp. I4-7--Ohio; BSSMEmlyn
E. Gardiner and G. J. Chickering, Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan (Ann Arbor,
I939), p. 38o-Michigan; FSRA-A, B-Louis W. Chappell, Folk Songs of Roanoke and the Albemarle
(Morgantown, W. Va., I939), pp. 88-89-North Carolina; FSS-John H. Cox, Folk Songs
of the South (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), p. 375-West Virginia; FSSA-A, G, H-Cecil J. Sharp,
English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, ed. Maud Karpeles (Oxford, 1932), Nos.
5ia, 5Ig, 5Ih-North Carolina; FSSA-B-Sharp, No. 5Ib--Tennessee; FSSA-C-Sharp, No. 51c
-Kentucky; FSSA-D, E, F-Sharp, Nos. 5Id 5Ie, 5if-Virginia; GGMS-Helen H. Flanders,
A Garland of Green Mountain Songs (Boston, I934), p. 48-Vermont; JAF-A-Phillips Barry,
"A Garland of Ballads," JAF, XXIII (1910), 447-New Jersey; JAF-B-Mary 0. Eddy and
Albert A. Tolman, "Traditional Texts and Tunes," JAF, XXXV (1922), 4I4-Ohio: JAF-CMellinger
E. Henry, "Still More Ballads and Folk Songs from the Southern High-Lands," JAF,
XLV (I932), II4-Georgia; JAF-D-Ruth Ann Musick, "The Old Album of William A.
Larkin," JAF, LX (I947), 215-Illinois; NCF-A, B, C, D-The Frank C. Brown Collection of
North Carolina Folklore, ed. Newman Ivey White (Durham, 1952), II, 287-290-North Carolina;
OF-A, C, D-Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs (Columbia, Mo., 1946), I, Nos. 70a, c, d
-Missouri; OF-B- Randolph, No. 7ob-Arkansas; SBNS-Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads
of Nova Scotia (Toronto, I932), p. 25-Nova Scotia; SCSM-Dorothy Scarborough, A Song-
Catcher in the Southern Mountains (New York, I937), p. 2o0-Virginia; SMS-K--Cecil J. Sharp
MSS., p. 3809-Virginia; TBV-Arthur K. Davis, Jr., Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Cam230
Journal of American Folklore
bridge, Mass., I929), p. 92-Virginia; UMS-H. M. Belden, "Songs and Ballads," Univ. of Mo.
Studies, XV:i (Columbia, Mo. I940), p. 103-Missouri; VFSB-Helen H. Flanders, Vermont
Folk Songs and Ballads (Brattleboro, I931), p. 232-Vermont; FSSJ-W. P. Merrick, in a group
of songs collected from Henry Hills of Sussex, in Journal of the Folk Song Society, I (I9oo),
p. Io5-England; FUT-Alfred Williams, Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames (London, I923),
p. II5-England; SMS-A, B, C, D, E, F-Cecil J. Sharp MSS., pp. 143, 627, Io90, I2o8, 1718, 1738
-England.
6 However, is it actually taken over from the ballad known variously as "Jack Monroe" or
"Jackie Frazier." In the version found on p. 330 of Cox (FSS), the lines read typically:
"Ah, daughter, ah, daughter! "You can lock me in the dungeon
I say you had better mind My body there confine,
I'll lock you in the dungeon But none but Jackie Fraisure
Your body there confine, Can ever suit my mind,
Oh, your body there confine." Oh can ever suit my mind."
7Using the Coverly text for a pattern for all the American variants, such a symbol as
"NC2:2" means that the cited line is parallel to line two of Coverly's second stanza.
University of California
Berkeley, California