The Youngest Daughter- Eaton (VT) 1935 Flanders A
[From Flanders, Ancient Ballads, Vol. 1, 1966, w/music. Coffin's notes follow. This version has an unusual repeated form because it has no refrains. For an analysis of this ballad: Psychopathology of Ballad Singing- Phillips Barry 1935.
R. Matteson 2014, 2018]
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.
A. The Youngest Daughter. Recorded, in south Royalton, Vermont, from the singing of Amos J. Eaton, brother to H. S. Eaton of Westfield, Massachusetts (who was currently reading the weekly articles by H. H. F. in the Springfield, Mass., Republican). The two gentlemen learned this song earlier from their mother in Sutton, Vermont. Printed, with its tune in BFSSNE, XI, 16. H. H. F., Collector; April 26, 1935. Structure: A B1 A B2 (2,2,2,2); Rhythm C; Contour: undulating and angular; Scale: tetratonic; t.c. G. Note the fanfare-like melody. For mel. rel. see BES, 42; FCB4, 13(A).
The Youngest Daughter
There was a man who lived out west,
Lived out west, lived out west,
There was a man who lived out west.
He loved his youngest daughter best.
He bought for his youngest a gay gold ring,
Gay gold ring, gay gold ring,
He bought for his youngest a gay gold ring.
The oldest, she hadn't anything.
He bought for his youngest a beaver hat,
A beaver hat, a beaver hat,
He bought for his youngest a beaver hat.
The oldest, she was mad at that.
One day these girls went down to swim,
Down to swim, down to swim,
One day these girls went down to swim,
The oldest pushed her sister in.
First she sank and then she swam,
Then she swam, then she swam,
First she sank and then she swam
Until she reached the miller's dam.
The miller put out his line and hook,
Line and hook, line and hook,
The miller took out his line and hook
And caught her by the petticoat.
The miller took off her gay gold ring,
Gay gold ring, gay gold ring,
The miller took off her gay gold ring
And threw her into the stream again.
The king and his son were riding by,
Riding by, riding by
The king and his son were riding by,
They heard the youngest daughter cry.
And so the riders Pulled her out,
Pulled her out, pulled her out,
And so the riders pulled her out,
To see what she was crying about.
Next day the old miller was hung for her sake,
Hung for her sake, hung for her sake,
Next day the old miller was hung for her sake,
And the eldest daughter was burned at the stake.