The Two Sisters- White (CT) 1949 Flanders D
[From Flanders, Ancient Ballads, Vol. 1, 1966, w/music. Coffin's notes follow. This version may be much older than 1949. Flanders calls this a fragment- doesn't seem that way-- ten verses.
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.
D. "Two Sisters." A fragment was recorded, on May 17, 1949, as Mrs. Edwin C. White of Naugatuck, Connecticut, sang. Within a day Mrs. white mailed the rest of the song as "she remembered, all of it as sung in her childhood by her mother. Published,
in Ballads Migrant in New England, 209. H. H. F., Collector; May 17, 1949; Structure: A B1 A CA B2 D E (2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2); Rhythm B; Contour: undulating; Scale: major
The Two Sisters
There was a miller lived in the West,
Bow down Bow down,
There was a miller lived in the West;
Declaring unto me,
There was a miller lived in the West;
He had two daughters of the best.
I will be true, true to my love
If my love will be true to me.
(Follow pattern throughout stanzas.)
The miller he courted the eldest first,
But still he loved the youngest best.
To the youngest he gave the gay gold ring,
And to the eldest he gave nothing.
To the youngest he gave the ruffled cap,
And the eldest she got mad at that.
The eldest said, "I'll be his bride."
The youngest she sat down and cried.
They wandered down to the river's brim;
The eldest pushed the youngest in.
She floated down to the miller's dam;
The miller he saw the same.
The miller he threw out his line and hook
And drawed her from the watery brook.
Hand in hand to the church they went;
They took their vows and were content.
The eldest rushed to the river side.
She dove, she sank and thus she died.