"The Waco Girl": Another Variant of a British Broadside Ballad by John Q. Anderson; Western Folklore, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Apr., 1960), pp. 107-118; Published by: Western States Folklore Society
[Some footnotes missing-- will add when I get time. Some of the analysis is wanting, some facts are wrong. He doesn't get all the version of Waco Girl and compare them.
R. Matteson 2016]
"The Waco Girl"-- Another Variant of a British Broadside Ballad
by JOHN Q. ANDERSON
[This paper was read at the forty-third annual meeting of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, Texas, March 28, 1959. For reading convenience, the texts of "The Waco Girl" have since been inserted.]
MURDER APPEARS TO BE one of the most popular subjects in balladry. The single murder that has probably given rise to more ballads than any other occurred in England two centuries ago. In 1744 in a town called Wittam in Berkshire County, a young man murdered a girl to whom he was engaged and was hanged for the crime (Q 413.4). Shortly thereafter a broadside appeared in London entitled "The Berkshire Tragedy, or the Wittam Miller"' which described in forty-four stanzas the motivation for the crime, the murder itself, and the murderer's trial and conviction. It also included his confession and a warning to other young men. From this single source in the following hundred and fifty years, a host of separate but similar ballads in the British Isles and America have told the same story, though more briefly and with a different setting. In the United States the more familiar of these murder ballads are "The Lexington Girl,"[Lexington Murder] "The Wexford Girl," "The Knoxville Girl," and "The Oxford Girl."
Still another variant of this ballad, called "The Waco Girl," has escaped the notice of ballad scholars and even most collectors in the Southwest to which it is native. It is familiar to this group through my singing,[1] though it has never appeared in print. Two versions of it were collected and deposited in the Library of Congress some twenty years ago,[2] and in addition to my own Panhandle version I have discovered another Texas version. Now a total of four versions are in the Library of Congress collection. I have known the version given below since my childhood in the early 1920's in Wheeler County in the Texas Panhandle. My sister, Esther Anderson Shinn, who taught it to me, says that she first heard it about 1906 from our aunt, Ethel Collins Anderson, a native of Catoosa in northeast Oklahoma. It is recorded on tape in the Library of Congress, Washington; the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music, Indiana University; and in the Archives of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin.
THE WACO GIRL- Text A
Down by the city of Waco
I used to live and dwell;
Down by the city of Waco
I owned a flour mill.
While going with a Waco girl
With dark and rolling eyes,
And calling at her sister's house
To take her by surprise.
I told her that we'd take a walk
And view the meadows so gay
And also have a social talk
And name our wedding day.
We walked along, we talked along
'Till we came to the level ground,
And picking me up a hackwood stick
I knocked that fair maid down.
And falling on her bending knees
"O Lord, have mercy," she cried;
"O Willie, my dear, don't murder me here;
I'm not prepared to die."
But paying no attention to her pleading words,
I beat her more and more
'Till the blood around her yellow hair
Stood all out in a gore.
Then picking her up by the yellow hair
I swung her round and round
And taking her down to the still water deep,
I threw her in to drown.
And turning on my journey home
At twelve o'clock that night,
My mother being worried
Woke all up in a fright.
"O Willie, my son what have you done
To bloody your hands and clothes?"
The answer that I gave her
Was bleeding at the nose.
And asking for a candle
To light my way to bed
And also for a kerchief
To bind my aching head.
I tossed and I tumbled,
No comfort could I find;
The devil and his angels
Around my bed did climb.
About six weeks or later
That Waco girl was found
A-floating down the still water deep
She had floated to Oxford town.
And taking me on suspicion
They locked me up in jail;
No one to speak a loving word,
No one to go my bail.
Her sister swore my life away,
She swore without a doubt
That I was the very lad
Who'd taken her sister out.
O Lord, they're going to hang me;
It's an awful death to die;
O Lord, they're going to hang me
Between this earth and sky.
Text B was contributed by Ray C. Barlow, a native of Corpus Christi, Texas. His mother, whose parents came from Tennessee, taught it to him. It is recorded on tape in the Archives of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin.
THE WACO GIRL-- Text B
"All around the Waco town
I used to live and dwell;
All around the Waco town,
I owned a flour mill.
"I fell in love with a Waco girl
With dark and rolling eyes.
I asked her to take a walk with me
And view the meadows so bright.
"We walked along, we talked along
'Till we came to the level ground.
I picked up a piece of new cut wood
And knocked the poor girl down.
"She fell upon her bended knees
And 'Lord, have mercy,' she cried,
Saying, 'Willie, my dear, don't murder me here,
I'm not prepared to die.' "
But heed, oh, heed, not a word did he,
But he beat her more and more
Until the ground was bloody all around
And the blood ran to and fro.
He picked her up by her long yellow hair
And swung her round and round,
And threw her into the river
That runs by Waco town.
"Lie there, lie there, you Waco girl,
For me you wouldn't be tied;
Lie there, lie there, you Waco girl,
For you never shall be my bride."
"I went into my mother's house
At twelve o'clock that night
My mother being weary
Woke up then in a fright.
"Saying, 'Son, O son, what have you done
To bloody your hands and clothes?'
The answer that I gave her
Was bleeding at the nose.
"Three weeks had passed;
This Waco girl, her body it was found
A-floating on the river
That runs through Waco town.
"They put me on suspicion
And I was locked in jail;
No one to entertain me;
No one to go my bail."
My purpose in this paper is to trace these two and other versions of "The Waco Girl" from the original British broadside and to offer theories to account for the changes that localized the ballad. Fortunately, much of the background work for this project has been done by Laws, who, in his American Balladry from British Broadsides, uses "The Berkshire Tragedy" and its offspring to illustrate the process of ballad recomposition." Since Laws either did not know "The Waco Girl" or chose not to include it in
his discussion, this paper is an extension of his findings supplemented by my own speculations.
I
In order to establish clearly the ancestry of "The Waco Girl," a summary of the story of "The Berkshire Tragedy" is necessary. [4] The young miller of Wittam was engaged to a girl from Oxford. When she became pregnant, he refused to marry her, and on a winter evening lured her into the countryside (K2232), beat her to death with a stick (S122), and threw her body into a river. Returning to the mill, he was questioned by his apprentice about the blood on his clothes, but he pretended that his nose had been bleeding. When the girl was missed, he was jailed on suspicion, but he covered up his crime by offering a reward for recovery of her body. Pleading innocence, he was released, though he was confined again when the body was found. He was arraigned for murder and sent to Reading Gaol. At the trial, evidence given by his apprentice caused the court to convict him. He eventually confessed and was hanged.
As Laws points out,[5] "The Berkshire Tragedy" was too long for convenient memorizing by ballad singers; consequently, the broadside, evidently wide-spread in the British Isles, was abridged and reprinted in much shorter versions. One version appeared in Ireland as "The Wexford Girl"; another called "The Cruel Miller" appeared as a broadside in Boston [not accurate- this is wrong--"Cruel Miller was English not from Boston and "The Wexford girl' never appeared in Ireland]; and still another called "The Lexington Miller" was printed.[6] Employing the "leaping and lingering" technique that McEdward Leach says is characteristic of traditional ballads,[7] these condensed versions omitted details that slowed down the action of the story. Pregnancy as the motivation for the crime was omitted from all American versions [not true- see Harmon version];[8] and details of the trial and confession were left out. The result was a ballad of twenty or less stanzas that could easily be memorized and which concentrated on dramatic action rather than cause and character.
Eventually a variant called "The Oxford Girl" emerged in the United States. Laws could find no broadside or basic text for this version which, he says, is the most widely known of all variants in America and which is, he maintains, "the most effective in its economy, its use of the folk idiom, and its dramatic impact[9]." Since "The Oxford Girl" is known only in the United States [not true], Laws speculates that some unknown composer in this country worked from previous texts, recomposed the story, and substituted the more familiar place name of Oxford for Wexford. Furthermore, Laws believes that "The Oxford Girl" descends from "The Berkshire Tragedy" through "The Cruel Miller" and "The Wexford Girl."[10]
In accordance with Laws' belief that the abridged broadside, "The Cruel Miller," is the source [they probably pre-date Cruel Miller] of most American variants [this certainly is not true- several versions use some Berkshire text], I made a comparison of five texts derived from that version: "The Wexford Girl," two texts of "The Oxford Girl" (one from Mississippi and one from Texas), the Tennessee "The Knoxville Girl," and Text A of the Texas "The Waco Girl."[11] The study revealed many striking similarities. All of these texts follow closely the extensive abridgment of "The Berkshire Tragedy." Stanza pattern and rhyme scheme are the same in the five texts. The number of stanzas varies from twelve to fifteen and they cover essentially the same details. For instance, the color of the murdered girl's hair in each text is yellow, and she has "dark and rolling eyes." In each, the man calls at the girl's house at night,[12] and proposes a walk during which they will name their wedding day. Though the Wexford text says that they walked to Oxford town, all Southern variants state that they walked to a meadow or "the level ground." The murder weapon mentioned in each text is a stick-"heavy wood," "hedge wood," and "edge wood." Appropriately in the Texas Text A the weapon is "hack-wood," a limb of the hackberry tree. In each text the girl pleads directly with the man named Willie for her life. Ignoring her plea, he beats her until the ground is bloody. Texas Text A states graphically, "'Till the blood around her yellow hair/Stood all out in a gore." Though in the Wexford text the man takes the dead girl by the "lily-white hands" to drag her to the river, in the variants he drags her by her hair, and in the Texas text he melodramatically swings her round and round by the yellow hair (S139.2.2). In all versions he throws the body into the river, specifically located in Oxford in the older versions, but simply "the still water deep" in the Tennessee and Texas variants in "The Cruel Miller," altered to brother in "The Wexford Girl," omitted in "The Oxford Girl," and returned to sister in "The Waco Girl."
In form and substance, then-that is, in stanza pattern, rhyme, imagery, concentration, and details'---"The Waco Girl" agrees so explicitly with the shortened versions of "The Berkshire Tragedy" that there can be no doubt that "The Waco Girl" is descended from that broadside and that it is a respectable member of that numerous family.
II
To the uninitiated, the text of "The Waco Girl" does not reveal its ancient lineage, for the unknown hand that localized the story cleverly made it appear to grow naturally out of its nineteenth-century Southwestern background. I am sure that the singers of the ballad in the Texas Panhandle accepted it as an account of an actual murder in Waco, Texas.[13] It is easy to see why; the opening stanza of Text A positively sets the scene:
Down by the city of Waco
I used to live and dwell;
Down by the city of Waco
I owned a flour mill.
The second stanza further affirms the locale: "I fell in love with a Waco girl," and later in the song "Waco girl" is again mentioned. Even the "hack-wood stick" used as the murder weapon is peculiarly Southwestern since the hackberry tree flourishes there. Then, the more violent action of this version of the story has a characteristic flavor: the murderer beats the girl until the blood stands out around her yellow hair, and he swings her round and round by the hair. Also, the murderer's vision of the devil and his angels has the imagery of a frontier camp-meeting sermon. The result is complete integration of an old story into a new setting and indicates the work of a conscious hand. Though I have no theory of whose it was, I do have some speculations as to how it came about.
The city of Waco, Texas, appears to be the locale. But why Waco instead of Dallas, Houston, Austin, or some other Texas town with a two-syllable name that would fit the metrical pattern? Speculating that a murder at Waco inspired the ballad, I looked for reports of such a crime, but alas I found none." My limited research did not include searching Waco newspapers and, therefore, does not preclude the possibility of such a murder as the inspiration.
On the other hand, since the broadside was given to moralizing, perhaps the adapter revised and localized the story to illustrate the evils of the city. Of course, any Texas town would have served, but doubtless the open vowels of the word "Waco" appealed to the writer as they would indeed to a ballad singer. From the rural point of view, Waco's early history was certainly no example of propriety. Established as Waco Village" in 1849 and incorporated in 1856, Waco was located on the famous Chisholm Trail. Though the railroad came in 1871,[] Waco was still a small frontier town in which, as one historian says, " 'Judge Colt' was still held to be principal arbiter of points of really serious dispute." The town was once called "Six Shooter Depot,"[] and its gambling houses were a public nuisance.[] The most sensational murder in the town's history occurred as late at 1898, when the crusading William C. Brann, editor of the notorious Iconoclast, was shot in the back on the streets of the city." These conditions were enough to give the town a reputation for evil.
Another phase of Waco's history may be related to the origin of the ballad. In 1833 a group of settlers from Tennessee located a few miles down the Brazos River from Waco Village and appropriately called their community "Nashville." In 1839 the colony was augmented by more immigrants from the United States, including Shapley P. Ross and his later-famous son, Lawrence Sullivan Ross." Perhaps these settlers brought with them the ballads "The Oxford Girl" and "The Knoxville Girl." Perhaps some member of this group from an older and more law-abiding area recomposed those old ballads as a satire on the boisterous new town of Waco. Conversely, the broadsides that served as the basis for "The Waco Girl" could have come to Texas from a completely different direction. Possibly the immediate ancestor, "The Wexford Girl," was imported directly from Ireland. Texas in the early nineteenth century received two groups of Irish immigrants; the first of about one hundred and twenty-five arrived in south Texas in 1829, and the second of about one hundred and fifty came there in 1834. Significantly, James Powers, who brought the second group, was originally from county Wexford, Ireland. He recruited most of his colonists from his home county, and they embarked from the port of Wexford." If "The Wexford Girl" was current that early," these immigrants probably brought it with them. Since of all European immigrants to America the Irish were the most conscious of tradition, the best singers, and the most strongly attached to the old country," they should have had a special affection for "The Wexford
Girl."
Even if "The Wexford Girl" was not imported by these early immigrants, it could have come with the waves of Irishmen that poured into the United States later on, particularly after the potato famine of the 1840's. A million and a half of them came between 1841 and 1855, the very time when migration to Texas was the heaviest, and a considerable group settled in Galveston. An estimated eighty-five thousand Irish had located in the South before the Civil War."[3] Well into the last half of the nineteenth century immigrant Irish were exploited for cheap, unskilled labor, particularly in railroad construction; the railroad boom in Texas after the Civil War brought in many Irish. Many joined the Army and remained in Texas after serving there."[3] These facts support Laws' statement that "The Wexford Girl" is one of the most widely known ballads in America, about fifty texts having been printed from tradition."
If the ballad ancestors of "The Waco Girl" came from the Tennessee settlers or from the Irish or both, it is strange that their offspring, "The Waco Girl," has not been reported in tradition in the Waco area. Owens did not report it from his collecting in east Texas, though he does report "The Oxford Girl." Curiously, the best text of "The Waco Girl" comes from northeastern
Oklahoma, and a second inferior text also comes from that state. A third text comes from southwest Louisiana, and only one text comes from Texas, and that some two hundred and sixty miles from Waco. The spread represented by these four texts is several thousand square miles, the farthest point from Waco being about three hundred and fifty miles. Of course, traffic on the
Chisholm Trail and the older cattle trail from Texas to New Orleans could have spread the song north, south, and east.
Since two of the four texts come from Oklahoma, an Oklahoma origin of "The Waco Girl" may be indicated. A tenuous speculation is that the ballad is in some way connected with the Waco Indians, a minor tribe of the Wichita group. In 1852 explorer R. B. Marcy found a village of about two hundred Wacos in southeastern Oklahoma near what is now Rush Springs. In 1859 when Texas expelled the Indians, about one hundred and seventy more joined their kin in Oklahoma. Marcy found the Wacos with their Wichita kin living peacefully "between the white settlements and the prairie tribes" and "at the mercy of both." Consequently, they had become a harmless, agrarian people who were on "terms of friendship with all neighbors."" After the Civil War, as Oklahoma filled up with white settlers and soldiers at the military posts, the Wacos continued on friendly terms with the whites. Possibly some white man seduced a Waco girl and murdered her. Or perhaps some less dramatic incident inspired someone to rewrite the old ballads and use the musical Indian name. If so, it seems that the writer should have
completely transformed the story into a pseudo-Indian ballad, such as "Little Mohee" or "Fallen Leaf," and given an Indian name to the girl.
In conclusion, exactly who adapted "The Waco Girl" and why will probably never be known, though I hope that further research will provide more and better theories. Meanwhile, this much can now be said: on the basis of textual comparison, "The Waco Girl" proves not only to be a descendant of the original English broadside, but a worthy one. The fact that I have found no regional source for the ballad may indicate that it-- like "The Oxford Girl," for which Laws could find no source--is indeed a basic text of its own and therefore represents in Laws' line of descent a seventh and final text.'
"Grant Foreman (ed.), Adventure on Red River: Report on the Exploration of the Headwaters of the Red River by Captain Randolph B. Marcy and Captain G. B. McClellan (Norman, 1937), p. 126.
1 Laws, American Balladry, p. 119, represents the descent graphically as follows:
THE BERKSHIRE TRAGEDY
The Lexington Miller The Cruel Miller
The Butcher Boy
The Lexington Murder The Wexford Girl
The Oxford Girl
Whatever the truth may be, "The Waco Girl" like its predecessors is an intriguing example of the capacity of the murder ballad to survive time and changing social conditions because of concentration on universal human emotions.
Texas A. and M.
It is suggested that his graph might be revised to include "The Waco Girl" as follows:
BERKSHIRE
Lexington Miller Cruel miller
Butcher Boy
Wexford girl
Waco Girl
Footnotes:
1 G. Malcolm Laws, American Balladry from British Broadsides (Philadelphia, 1957), pp. 104-109, prints the text with the note that it is "From the 18th century broadside in Harvard College Library. The imprint reads: 'London: Printed and Sold in Stonecutter-street, Fleet-Market.' The stanzas are not divided or numbered in the broadside."
2 Checklist of Songs in English in the Archives of American Folksong, p. 417, shows: "Waco Girl, The, sung by Eddie Murphy, Crowley, La., Coll. by Lomax, 1934," and "Waco Girl, The, sung by Fred Ross, Arvin, Calif., coll. by Chas. L. Todd and Robert Sonkin, 1940 The Library of Congress was unable to locate the Louisiana version.
3 Laws, pp. 112-122.
4 Ibid., pp. lo4-1og.
5 Ibid., p. 114-
6 Ibid., pp. 112-114.
7 Leach, The Ballad Book (New York, 1955), p. 4.
8 Laws, p. 23.
9 Ibid., p. 119.
10. Ibid.
11. The texts used were: "The Cruel Miller," Laws, pp. 112-113; "The Wexford Girl," Arthur
P. Hudson, "Ballads and Songs from Mississippi," Journal of American Folklore, XXXIX (1926),
125-126; "The Oxford Girl," ibid., pp. 127-128; "The Oxford Girl," William A. Owens, Texas
Folk Songs (Dallas: Texas Folklore Society, 1950), p. 81; "The Knoxville Girl," B. A. Botkin,
A Treasury of Southern Folklore, pp. 737-738; and "The Waco Girl," my own version, given above.
12. The time in the Wexford text is 8:00 P.M., it is 9:00 P.M. in the Botkin text, and it is not
mentioned in the Texas versions.
[ ]
19 Laws, p. soo, stresses parallels in form and substance as reliable methods of ballad identification.
20 Vance Randolph, Ozark Folk-Songs, II, 92-95, says in connection with a text of "The Noel
Girl" that many people in Missouri believed that the ballad is a true account of a murder committed near Lanagan, Missouri, in 1892. Actually, it is another variant of "The Berkshire Tragedy."
21 Law librarians at Baylor and the University of Texas were unable to locate any such case,
as was the librarian of the Texas Collection at Baylor. Of course, since names are unknown,
the possibility of finding such a case is remote.
22 Dorothy Scarborough, "Traditions of the Waco Indians," Publications of the Texas Folklore
Society, I (1916), 50-54, explains that the Indian word "waco" means "sandhill," and was probably
used to refer to the sand beds along the Brazos River in the Waco area, the original home of the
Waco Indians.
2 Robert N. Conger, Highlights of Waco History (Waco, 1945), pp. 41, 58.
2 Handbook of Texas, II, 847-
2 Conger, Highlights of Waco History, p. 6o, says that in 1869 Judge G. B. Gerald personally
broke into the leading gambling house in town early one morning, before it opened, and smashed
furniture and equipment and threw them out the window. That was practically the end of
gambling houses in the town.
" Ibid., pp. 63-64.
= Ibid., pp. 23-24.
28 William H. Oberste, Texas Irish Empresarios and Their Colonies (Austin, 1953), pp. 21, 46,
56, 6o, 102-103.
0 Laws, American Balladry, pp. 104 ff., assumes that "The Wexford Girl" derives from "The
Cruel Miller," a broadside without date but which he calls "late."
30 Carl Wittke, The Irish in America (Baton Rouge, 1956), p. 241.
31 Ibid., pp. 24, 147-
32 The Irishman was a stock comic figure in the humorous reports of the Army in the War with
Mexico, especially in the sketches printed in the Spirit of the Times, the New York weekly sport-
ing journal. An example of an Irishman who served in the Confederate Army and later settled
in Texas is J. P. Blessington, author of The Campaigns of Walker's Texas Division (New York,
1876), and later city official in Waco, Texas.
33 Laws, p. 104.