O Sister- Purcell (VA) c.1890 Davis GG
[My title. Fragment from Davis, More Traditional Ballad of Virginia, 1960, with music. Davis' extensive notes follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
THE TWA SISTERS
(Child, No. 10)
One of the few old ballads that Child found to be still extant in oral tradition, "The Twa Sisters', is rich in American texts. Coffin moreover, accredits it with "more American story variations than any other ballad."
The narratives of the English and Scottish versions fall into two broad categories on the basis of the action after the older sister, motivated by jealousy, pushes the younger into the sea: one in which the body of the drowned girl is brought ashore by a miller, and some part of it is made into a musical instrument which reveals the murder; and the other in which the girl is rescued by a miller who robs her, then pushes her in again and is subsequently hanged for the deed. In general, the American texts preserve the second form and omit the musical instrument material, which is preserved in only one exceptional Virginia version, AA. This version resembles Child B in its narrative detail, but has the "bow down, true to my love" refrain of Child R, S, U, Y, Z. The wicked sister, previously unnamed in Virginia, is here named Elinder (compare with Ellen of Child B), and this may possibly be a variant introduced from "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet." AA is truly a collector's item, as a glance at coffin's survey will show.
As evidenced by narrative detail and refrain, the Virginia versions of "The Twa Sisters" normally belong with child, R, S, U, Y, Z, in which the villainous miller is executed for murdering the girl- (although the method of discovery is not revealed) -a form of the ballad which child considered "entirely wanting in ancient authority." FF, a fragment with "Hey, ho, my honey O," refrain, belongs with Child G and J. Most of tire Virginia texts belong to coffin's Story Type A, except that AA and possibly FF represent story types not recognized by him.
There is a tendency in both the British and American versions for this ballad to become abbreviated by the loss of narrative material subsequent to the lines in which the older sister pushes the younger into the sea, or the lines in which the miller pushes her in again. The closing of the ballad on these scenes introduces a comic effect which is heightened when the tune is not sung in a completely traditional manner. JJ verges dangerously close to burlesque, and for this reason has been relegated to last place among the newly collected material.
The many variants of the "true to my love" refrain lend a moving and simple lyrical quality much -more appropriate to the traditional nature of the ballad. The refrains have received considerable scholarly attention: see Barry, BFSSNE, III, 11; Mellinger, JAFL, XLV, 2; and for a discussion of the use of the refrain in dance games, see Botkin, The American Play Party Song, pp. 59 ff.
Following the extremely rare text AA, without tune, this ballad offers a number of beautiful tunes, most of them meticulously transcribed with all significant variants, from phonographic recordings. See the headnotes to individual versions of variants to follow. There are also interesting textual variations. Since Child printed a larger number of versions of this ballad (twenty-seven) than of any other ballad except one ("Mary Hamilton," No. 173, since this ballad has more American story variants than any other ballad, and especially since eight of the ten texts given here have distinctive tunes and the two without tunes (AA and II) are significant variants, it has seemed impossible to exclude any of the ten. TBVa, printed ten of a dozen available texts, plus six tunes. The ten given here represent fully the subsequent Virginia collection.
The ballad survives vigorously in recent English and Scottish tradition, especially Scottish, and has Continental affiliates in many languages. See Dean-Smith' Greig-Keith, Child.
Bronson (I, 143-84) prints a total of 97 musical versions or variants (plus texts), divided into four major groups: Group A, with twenty-two variants, contains most of the older or Scottish records, with the "Binnorie" refrain; Group B, by far the largest group of fifty variants subdivided into six parts, includes a few English and the greater portion of recent American variants, which generally keep to elaborate and repetitious "Bow down" refrains; Group C, of only three variants, is entirely Scottish and has the "Edinburgh, Edinburgh" refrain; Group D, with a sparse seven variants from Scotland, Ireland, and the United States, has the swan-refrain; and Group E contains a total of nine "anomalies." Here, as always with Bronson, the basic principle of classification is musical and rather too complicated and technical for satisfactory summary. All six of the Virginia tunes of TBVa he classifies under one or another subdivision of Group B. Under the rarer Group D he lists the text of TBVa K, which here reappears, with its tune now supplied, as FF below, a rarity of Scottish extraction of the seven tunes below, six (BB, CC, DD, EE, GG, and JJ) belong to one or another subdivision of Bronson's Group B; the seventh, FF, falls into Bronson's Group D.
GG. [O Sister] No title given. Collected by Miss Margaret Purcell, of Greenwood, Va. her grandmother, Elizabeth Ashton Garrett Purcell (Mrs. S. H. Purcell), of Greenwood, Va., in the early nineties. Albemarle County. May, 1934. Tune noted by Winston Wilkinson. "A fine Mixolydian tune. . .Occasional and cadential Major 7th" (Mead).
1 "O sister, O sister, give me your hand,"
Bow down, bow down,
"O sister, O sister, give me your hand,"
And bow down to me,[1]
"O sister, O sister, give me your hand,
And I will give you my house and land."
I'll be true, true to my love,
And my love be true to me.
1. variant line (see music, above): "And bough, bend to me."