The Lone Widow- Stebbins (MO) c1909 Belden A
[My date, which could be earlier (to 1903)- no date given. Belden: Ballads and Songs- 1940. His extensive notes follow.
Between 1909 and 1911 Goldy Mitchell Hamilton (1881- 1955) one of Belden's students, taught English at West Plains High School. There she collected ballads from her students who were so taken by the prospect of ballad collecting that they wrote an article for the school yearbook, The Zizzer (Cohen).
R. Matteson 2015]
The Wife of Usher's Well
(child 79)
This ballad has persisted better in America than in the old country. Child's C is from Shropshire, 'taken down 24th March, 1883, from the recitation of an elderly fisherman at Bridgworth;' I have found no later record of it in the British Isles. Nor has it been reported from Canada or Newfoundland. In the United States many texts have been taken down in recent years, nearly all of them from the South. In Maine Barry found one person who recognized nearly all of Cox's West Virginia text A and another who knew several stanzas of Cox's B and D; it has not otherwise been recorded from New England. Texts have been printed from Virginia (TBV 278-88, SharpK I 157-9, SCSM 168-9), 'West Virginia (FSS 88-93), Kentucky (JAFL XXX 808, FSKM 4, BKH 59-60, SharpK I 155-7), Tennessee (ETWVMB 121-2, SharpK I 152-3, 160, FSSH 71-2), North Carolina (Child V 294-5, JAFL XXX 306-7 (by way of California), SharpK I 150-2, 153-4, 159-60), Georgia (JAFL XLIV 69-4, FSSH 70-1), Mississippi (FSM 93-5), Nebraska (ABS 20-1), the Ozarks (OASPS 180-1), and Missouri.
All of these American texts seem to belong to one version, distinguished from Child A B C by the following particulars:
1. The revenants are children (most often 'babes') not the 'stalwart sons' of Child A.
2. There is no cursing of the waters; but the mother often prays for the return of her babes.
3. The children decline earthly food and drink because 'yonder stands our Savior dear, to him we must resign.' And commonly, too, the splendor of the golden spread. the mother lays upon their bed is rebuked as evidence of worldly pride.
4. The children are sent away at the beginning to 'learn their grammaree', a feature not found in Child A B C.
5. The recall of ghosts by cock-crow is either changed to the crowing of 'chickens' (except in BBM B, which is Irish)-- this looks like a case of American bowdlerizing-- or is omitted altogether, the children refusing the fine bed their mother has prepared for them or simply making one another at the proper time.
6. Use of the folk-belief that tears shed for the dead disturb their rest in the grave by wetting their winding-sheet. This is a not unfailing but a very common feature of the American texts and does not appear in Child A, B, C.
The Shropshire version has in common with these American texts a strongly religious coloring, but has little resemblance to them in detail. One suspects some printed source as the explanation of the likeness in the American texts, but I find no mention of such.
I have in my file (it was printed in JAFI, XXX 308-9) a text from Tennessee and also one printed in the Grapurchat, school paper of the East Radford (Va.) State Teachers College and sent to me by Professor Jean Taylor. The former was communicated to me by Professor A. R. Hohlfeld of the University of Wisconsin, who had it from Miss Mary Pierce of Nashville, In answer to a query of mine as to the provenience of the text Miss Pierce wrote to me: I remember that the woman who gave me "The Wife of Usher's Well" said that it was from a (ballad) book.' Neither of these texts is from Missouri and they are
therefore not given here.
A. 'The Lone Widow.' Given to Miss Hamilton by Nita Stebbins of the West Plains (Howell County) High School, who had it 'from a woman who used to live in the country. A song that her mother used to sing to her.' Printed in JAFL XXIII 429.
There was a lady neat,
And children she had three;
She sent them away to far countrye
To learn their grammaree.[1]
They hadn't been gone but a little while,
About three months, we'll say,
Till death was abroad all over the land
And swept her babes away.
One winter night about Christmas time,
The night was dark and cold,
Her three little babes came running home
Into their mother's room.
It was over the table she spread a cloth
And on it bread and wine,
Saying 'Rise ye up, you three little. ones,
And eat and drink of mine.'
I'll eat none of your bread, mother,
I'll drink none of your wine,
For yonder is our Savior dear
And with him we will join.
'Cold clods lay over our heads, mother,
Green grass grows over our feet;
The tears you have shed, my mother dear,
Would wet our winding-sheet.'
1. Originally- "grammare"