The Seven Sleepers- Morris (VA) 1932 Davis AA
[From Davis- More Traditional Ballad from Virginia. Davis's notes follow Foss. It's interesting to see that Davis is aware of the Smith's (Thomas P. Smith and his brother) submitting a version already published in Brown as a "new" version. However, Davis gives credence to some of the the unusual offerings of the Smiths in his 1960 book.
The Morris version is similar to the dozen versions from the Shenandoah region in Virginia. George Foss who collected an excellent version in 1961 from Robert Shiflett, wrote about the region From White Hall to Bacon Hollow. Also see article at bottom of this page: Secrets of the Blue Ridge: Victoria Morris: From Bacon Hollow to Pennsylvania Avenue by Phil James.
R. Matteson 2014]
Victoria Shiflett Morris, with her children c. 1933
George Foss, From White Hall to Bacon Hollow excerpts:
From White Hall to Bacon Hollow is about a place and about its culture and people. I have granted myself the author's indulgence of selecting a title significant in its double meaning. White Hall to Bacon Hollow is a stretch of twisting country road, Virginia route 810, crossing the line between Albemarle and Greene Counties.
The earliest settlers of importance to the area were members of the Brown family. The patriarch of the Virginia Browns was Benjamin Brown, who began acquiring land in Albemarle County in 1747. He amassed six thousand acres of what was to become known as Brown's Cove. Included in these holdings was a tract patented to him by King George III in 1750.
It is of importance at this point to mention Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., who was a collector of ballads and folksongs specifically of Virginia. He was not a collector in the same sense as Sharp, that is a field worker and face-to-face gatherer of songs. He was more in the mold of Francis James Child, the great collector-editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, that is, he served to gather and organize, to sift and evaluate the field work of numerous amateur, hobbyist and professional collectors. As early as 1929 he produced Traditional Ballads of Virginia; in 1949 he published Folksongs of Virginia and More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, all three under the auspices of the Virginia Folklore Society. A courtly gentleman “of the old school,” he was professor of English literature at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a great span of time. It was professor Davis who was Paul Clayton Worthington's teacher at the University during the 1950's and inspired Paul's interest in balladry and folksong.
Two later collectors who visited and worked in the White Hall-Bacon Hollow area were Richard Chase and professor Winston Wilkinson whose manuscripts are now kept by the University of Virginia. They were the first collectors to record the songs of some of the finest singers in the region, Ella Shiflett and Victoria Shiflett Morris as early as 1935.
Excerpt of Davis' notes:
In Virginia the ballad is reasonably rare. TBVa, printed four variants, of five available, and two tunes. Of five items (not counting two overlapping ones) more recently collected and listed in FSVa, four are here presented, all of them with tunes. The one omitted item contributed by R. E. Lee Smith and Thomas p. Srnith, though long resident in Virginia, comes ultimately from North Carolina and is printed in Brown, II, 29-3c.. It is also a good full text available in the Virginia collection.
Bronson (I, to6-27) finds "a marked formal cleavage" in the musical tradition of "this impressive ballad." He divides his forty tunes into six groups of one, two, fourteen, seven, three, and thirteen members, respectively. His fourth group of seven variants consists of texts and tunes collected in Virginia by either Sharp and Karpeles, Winston Wilkinson, or the present editor. "Group D," he says, "is a comparatively small gathering of Virginia variants with mid-cadence consistently on the flat seventh. All are authentic Dorian tunes. The group as a whole begins to display marks of the omnipresent 'Gypsy Laddie' scheme, which appears much more clearly in the next group." TBVa B he classifies ln this Group D, while TBVa D appears in his final "aberrant" Group F, of the four new tunes here given, he would certainly find both AA and BB highly distinctive specimens in any grouping. Incidentally, DD below is a later recording and transcription-from the same singer as TBVa D (Bronson's Group F, No. 40), interestingly varied and now verifiable. of the tunes below, AA belongs in Bronson's Group D, of which it is a fine example; CC shows a similarity to Bronson's Group A, Ia; and DD falls clearly into Bronson's-Group F.
AA. "The Seven Sleepers.' Phonograph record (aluminum) made by A. K. Davis, Jr.- Sung by Mrs. vicioria Morris, of Mt. Fair, Va., Albemarle County. November 21, 1932. Text transcribed by p. C. Worthington. Tune noted by Winston Wilkinson.
"A rich Dorian tune," writes E. C. Mead, "in every respect one of the most beautiful tunes in the. tradition," and he goes on to specify its distinctions as "fascinating rhythmic irregularities, expressive line, movement largely diatonic, figured melodic style." The editor can vouch, less technically, for the moving quality of the performance.
1 "Wake up, wake up, You seven sleepers,
And heed the warning of me.
Please[1] take care of your oldest daughter dear,
For the youngest[2] just a-going with me."
2 He mounted up on a milk-white steed,
Herself upon the dapple gray,
He drew his buckler[3] down by his side,
And away went a-singing away.
3 "Wake up, wake up, my seven sons bold,
And put on your armor so bright,
I'll never have it said that a daughter of mine
Shall stay with a lord all night."
4 He rode, he rode, he better, better rode,
Along with his lady so dear,
Until she saw her seven brothers bold,
And her father a-walking so near."
Until she saw her seven brothers bold,
And her father a-walking so-near.
5 "Get you down, get you down, Lady Margret," he said,
"And hold my steed for a while,
Until I fight you seven brothers bold,
And your father a-walking so near."
6 She held, she held, a better, better hold,
And she never shedded a tear,
Until she saw her seven brothers fall,
And her father she loved so dear,
Until she saw her seven brothers fall,
And her father she loved so dear.
7 He mounted up on the milk-white steed,
And herself upon the dapple gray,
" He drew his buckle down by his side
And away went a-bleeding away.
8 He rode, he rode, he[4] better, better rode,
Along with his lady so dear,
Until he came to his own mother's stile,
Where he did love so dear'
9 "O Mother, Mother, go make my bed,
And make it soft and wide,
And lay my lady down by my side
That I may rest for a while."
10 Lord William he died about midnight,
Gay Margret before it was day,
And the old woman died for the loss of her son,
So there was eleven lives lost.
1. Possibly "To"
2. Possibly "youngest's."
3. Changed, originally "buckle." A buckler is a a small shield.
4. Changed from "a better, better. . ." The same change could be made in stanza 6.
---------------------------
Secrets of the Blue Ridge: Victoria Morris: From Bacon Hollow to Pennsylvania Avenue
By Phil James
When Ben and Icy Shifflett’s beautiful baby girl Victoria was born into the highlands of western Greene County in late fall of 1895, the name of everyone’s game was work, and none of it easy. The challenge of surviving the upcoming winter in the mountains was compounded with the arrival of their ninth child, two of whose earlier siblings had not lived beyond childhood.
Greene’s Bacon Hollow is contained by Flattop, Wyatt, Hightop and Snow Mountains. Roach River, proceeding from below Powell Gap, runs the full length of this secluded vale. Since the 1930s, residents have exchanged distant glances with the windshield explorers who stop at the hollow’s namesake overlook 1,200 vertical feet above on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park.
It was an apt description that “a woman’s work is never done,” particularly amid such remote surroundings at the turn of the 20th century. Sans electricity and with a water supply that only ran outdoors and downhill, everyday was a tough haul for Isaphrine “Icy” Shifflett simply to keep her growing family fed and clothed. Her husband Ben’s lot “from sun to sun” centered on subsistence farming and managing his minimal livestock. Wage paying jobs were seasonal, few and dangerous: stave mill jobs, cutting and dragging timber logs, saw mill work, digging sassafras stumps and roots or stripping tree bark to sell.
More often than not, any semblance of diversion from most tasks at hand involved singing ballads, to one’s self or in turn with others. This pleasing distraction was one in which several members of the Shifflett family excelled, and it was a very important part of the family and communities in which young Victoria was nurtured.
When Victoria wed Leonard Morris near Christmastime in 1919, song collectors from home and abroad had begun to wend their way into the hinterlands of Appalachia in search of the old tunes. Sometimes referred to as “songcatchers,” these collectors were typically academics. Their passion was to preserve variants of original English and Scottish popular ballads before the singers, along with their songs brought over from the old country, were lost to eternity.
Among the more preeminent of the collectors was Cecil Sharp, who made several trips to America from England during the years of the First World War. With his able assistant Maud Karpeles, he traversed the remote mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, noting down the words and tunes of a vanishing art form. Owing to the remoteness and difficult access in certain regions of Appalachia, pockets of singers could still be found who remained uncorrupted by more contemporary musical influences.
Nearing the close of his time in America in 1918, Sharp wrote in a letter to one of his hosts, former U.Va. English Professor C. Alphonso Smith, “I have found the tunes in Virginia extraordinarily beautiful; I think of greater musical value than those I have taken down anywhere else in America.”
Smith, a founder of the Virginia Folklore Society and himself an avid ballad collector, had introduced and directed Sharp to traditional singers in central Virginia. Among those local singers, a small handful eventually would be singled out for special honor.
Victoria and Leonard Morris moved to Browns Cove in northwestern Albemarle County, and, between 1922 and 1927, were blessed with three boys of their own. Leonard found ample work on the area’s farms, and, in his spare time, shaped wooden handles for all manner of hand tools, selling them through the local store. During fruit harvest seasons, they labored together alongside their neighbors in the orchards and fruit packing sheds, earning seasonal cash in an otherwise barter society.
The Great Depression sent the nation reeling. Though its effects were less visible on the rural poor than on the dependent masses in the cities, despair was prevalent throughout the land. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives offered relief work and a subsistence government wage to many of the neediest.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt quickly became known for her interest in the plights of the poor and oppressed, and she maintained a rigorous travel itinerary to that end. The same weekend in 1933 that FDR toured the Civilian Conservation Corps camps in Shenandoah National Park, the First Lady was a guest at the Whitetop Folk Festival in southwest Virginia, where she was entertained with the musical traditions of mountain singers, dancers and musicians.
John Powell, one of the organizers of the festival on Whitetop Mountain, was a Virginia native and renowned composer who had graduated in 1901 from the University of Virginia. His association with Mrs. Roosevelt led to his being invited to organize a contingent of traditional singers and musicians from central Virginia to perform in concert at the White House.
Victoria Morris was among the group chosen to accompany Powell to Washington. Her credentials had long been acknowledged by her neighbors. Scholars and authors Roger Abrahams and George Foss analyzed the repertoire and styles of many singers from the region and noted that Victoria and her Shifflett cousins Ella and Florence were “some of the most outstanding folksingers in the area.”
In attempting to describe the voice of Victoria Morris captured on early field recordings, Ernest C. Mead Jr., then-chairman of the music department and now professor emeritus at U.Va., wrote, “No system of notation can adequately catch the epic quality of Victoria Morris’ severe yet intense and figured style…”
During the long administration (1933–1945) of President Franklin Roosevelt, more than 300 diverse musical events were held at the White House. Both the President and First Lady genuinely enjoyed traditional music styles, and John Powell’s circle of performers surely did not disappoint.
Following the performance, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her usual warm and gracious manner, chatted with the group and showed them around the White House. Near the close of their time together, she asked Victoria if there might be something she would like to have as a souvenir of her visit. Having noted a rough edge on the stair railing where her hand rested, Victoria replied that she wouldn’t mind having a “splinter of wood” from the White House by which to remember her special visit. Mrs. Roosevelt replied that she would see that Victoria’s wish was fulfilled.
A short time after settling back into her busy life as wife and mother in Brown’s Cove, a package arrived from the White House. It contained a photograph of the First Lady, personally inscribed to Victoria—framed in wood that originally had been used in the reconstruction of the White House roof following its burning by the British Army during the War of 1812. The treasured keepsake had a small, engraved brass plaque affixed to it stating its provenance.
Victoria Shifflett Morris’ God-given talent for singing, nurtured and encouraged by family and friends, provided her with lifelong enjoyment, as well as a story or two to be cherished by her descendants.