The Three Sisters- Price (RI-MA) 1945 Flanders C
[From Flanders, Ancient Ballads, Vol. 1, 1966, w/music. Coffin's notes follow. Cf. Lucy E. Broadwood and J. A. Fuller Maitland (English County Songs [London, 1893], 118.
Coffin fails to mention that the text of the version by Broadwood and Maitland (1893) is taken from The Barkshire Tragedy (from The Scouring of the White Horse, or, The Long Vacation Ramble of a London Clerk) by Thomas Hughes in 1859 which is Child R c. The text of Flanders C is based that version of a similar version from the same region.
R. Matteson 2014]
The Twa Sisters [Notes by Coffin]
(Child 10)
One finds more confusions and more plot variations in the versions of this song than in those of any other Child ballad. Texts A-C below follow the most common English pattern: the "singing bones" motif is absent; the "bow down, I'll be true" refrain is used; the miller robs the drowning girl, shoves her back in the water, and is later executed; and the events teeter on the edge of comedy. In A and B the elder sister is burned at the stake. C, in which the two sisters, one drowned, flee "beyond the seas"; D, in which the miller is the father and lover of the girls and rescues the younger; and E, in which "to church they all did go" at the end, are quite typical of the mix-ups that can occur in this song. C, it would appear, has been learned in some fashion or other from Lucy E. Broadwood and J. A. Fuller Maitland (English County Songs [London, 1893], 118). For texts similar to D, see JAF, XVIII, 131, and J. Harrington Cox, Folk Songs of the South (Cambridge, 1925), 2A. For one similar to E, see Harold Thompson's Body, Boots, and Britches (New York, 1940), 393. Songs such as the F fragment which actually include the harp made from the dead girl's body are rare in America. See Belden, 17, for a list of the few texts that preserve this trait which Child called the germ of the ballad. Archer Taylor, who studied the British backgrounds of this song in JAF, XLIII, 238 L., concludes that American variants with their use of the "beaver hat" (see A and D below) and their failure to describe the yellow hair of the victim (see A-E below) are from English, rather than Scottish, sources. For a bibliography, as well as an extensive cataloguing of story variations that have been worked off this English theme in America, see Coffin, 38-42. For a start on a British bibliography, see Dean-Smith, 113; Ord, 430 f.; and Greig and Keith, 9 f. Barry includes the song in British Ballads from Maine, 40.
The story itself is widespread in Europe in both tale and ballad form. Paul Brewster has recently done a complete study of "The Twa Sisters" in FFC, No. 147 (1953). He also included a good working bibliography to both the tale and the ballad in his Ballads and Songs of Indiana (Indiana University Publications, Folklore Series No. I [Bloomington, 1940], 42-43). He feels the song began in Norway before 1600, spread through Scandinavia, and then to Britain and the west. However, he indicates that the folktale tradition (see Aarne-Thompson, Mt. 780) is Slavic in origin. Harbison Parker's remarks in JAF, LXIV, 347-60, are not out of sympathy with this point of view.
In the light of this scholarship, it is fascinating to find a Polish version of the ballad like G in New England. Mrs. Stankiewicz' text, in which the younger sister is murdered during a raspberrying contest and in which the flute is made from reeds at the grave, is probably a folk variant of a ballad "Maliny," written in lB29 by Alexander Chodzko (1804-91). See Phillips Barry's detailed discussion of this text in BFSSNE, X, 2-5, and XI, 2-4. Pertinent bibliography beyond what is given there can be had by consulting the following: Paul Brewster's monograph cited above; the earlier study by Lutz Mackenson in FFC, No. 49 (Helsinki, 1923); Child, I, 124-25; and Jonas Balys, Lithuanian Narrative Folksongs (Washington, D.C., 1954), G7, 119-20. In Slavic countries it is more common to find "The Twa Sisters" as a tale than as a ballad. See also, BFSSI/E, VII, 14, for a Swedish-American text.
The five tunes for Child l0 fall into three categories: 1) The versions sung by Eaton, Price, and White are fairly closely related, corresponding to group Ba in BC1 with the Eaton version a simplified form of the other two. The Montague tune corresponds to group Bd in BC1, being distantly related to the others, while the Polish melody does not seem to have musical relationship to any Anglo-American ballad tunes.
C. As sung by Miss Edith Balenger Price. of Newport, Rhode Island, Miss price learned, this ballad, from a lady whose
home was in Massachusetts but whose forebearers, from England. M. Olney, Collector; October 25, 1945, Structure: ABACDE (2,2,2,2,2,2); Rhythm A; Contour: undulating; Scale: major; t.c. F. For mel. rel. see BES, 42; FCFI4, 1B(A); also the German folk song "Freut euch des Lebens."
The Three Sisters
A farmer he lived in the far countree,
To my hey down, bow down.
A farmer he lived in a far countree
And he had daughters one, two, three;
And I'll be true to my love
If my love will be true to me.
As they were a-walking by the river's
The eldest pushed the youngest in.
"O sister, O sister, pray give me thy hand
And I'll give thee both house and land."
"I'll give thee neither land nor glove
Unless thou give thee thy own true-love!"
So down she sank and away she swam
Until she came to the miller's dam.
The miller's daughter she stood by the door
As sweet as any gillyflower.
"O father, O father, there swims a swan
Very like a drown-ed gentle woman!"[1]
The miller he brought his pole and hook
And fished the fair lady out of the brook.
"O miller, I'll give thee guineas ten
If thou'll take me back to my father again,"
The miller he took her guineas ten
And pushed the fair lady in again.
But the crowner[2] he came and the justice too
With a hew and a cry and a hallabiloo!
They hanged the miller beside his own gate
For drowning the farmer's daughter Kite.
The sisters they fled beyond the seas
And died old maids among black savagees.[3]
So ends my tale of the far countree.
Gentles, pray weep at my sad tragedy!
1. woman: pronounced "woo-maun"
2. coroner
3 savagees (sic) for savages.