Three Black Crows- Eaton (VT) c1880 Flanders E
[My date. From Flanders, Ancient Ballads; 1966; notes by Coffin follow. According to Ancestry.com, his parents Amos V Eaton and the source his mother, Ida M Eaton were born in 1840s.
Amos was born circa 1870, so this should date back to the 1880s.
R. Matteson 2014]
The Twa Corbies
(Child 26)
The tradition of "The Twa corbies" has given literature two of the most beautiful ballad poems known: the J. Ritson (Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry the Third, to the Revolution of London, 1790], 155) and the Sir Walter Scott (Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border [New York, 1902], III, 239) texts. The Ritson "Three Ravens" is a simple, honest lyric of true love without a maudlin or sentimental touch. It tells the wish of all knights, "God send euery gentleman, such haukes, such hounds, and such a leman." The Scott "Twa Corbies," on the other hand, is cynical, desolate, and Anglo-Saxon with the finality of its closing lines,
"O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
the wind sall blaw for evermair."
Thus, it is surprising to study the history of the ballad. As it is rare in Britain (Child has only one text beyond the two mentioned above), as it is not known to any extent in Canada, and as there are no European analogues, one is at a loss to explain how such a restricted oral tradition has developed such perfect poems. The answer cannot be suggested by what is found in America, either. Although it is common here, it owes its popularity to a minstrel stage burlesque that had great currency about the time of the Civil War and to its inclusion in rewritten form in books like Cleveland's Compendium of 1859. The American versions are mostly nonsense material like Flanders C-J in which two crows decide to eat a dead horse and in which there are no human actors. With their lines, such as "Oh maybe you think there is more, but there isn't" and "The Devil thought to injure me by cutting down my apple tree," they are in a real sense not Child 26 at all. However, Flanders A retains much of the spirit of "The Three Ravens" text and, like the one that Earl J. stout (Folklore from Iowa [New York, 1936], 2)found preserves the fidelity of the hounds and lady love. Such a text, sporting the borrowed "red rose" cliche, is an outstanding discovery in a tradition as corrupted as this. Flanders B, though not as true to the Ritson text, is nevertheless dignified and is not from the music hall tradition of "Billy Magee Magaw." The Scott form of the song, unburlesqued and unsentimentalized, has been discovered in America, too. See Henry W. Shoemaker, Mountain Minstrelsy (Philadelphia, 1931), 276. For an American bibliosraphy and discussion' see coffin, 52-54. Dean-smith lists itbr pug. lll, and there is an extensive study of the ballad in Hermann Tardel's ZweiLied, studien, I. Die Englisch-Schottische Roben Ballade (Bremen). Jane Zielonko's remarks in her Master's thesis, "Some American variants of Child Ballads" ([Columbia University, 1945], 7l f.), are also useful.
The large number of tune families for this ballad in BC1 indicates the diversity of tunes by which this text is accompanied. Thus it is not surprising to find the three tunes presented here to be unrelated.
E. "Three Black Crows." As sung by Amos Eaton of South Royalton, Vermont; learned from his mother
Three Black Crows
There were three crows sat on one tree,
O Billy McGee, Billy McGee!
There were three crows sat on one tree,
O Billy McGee, McGaw,
There were three crows sat on one tree
And they were black as crows could be,
And they all flapped their wings and cried,
"Caw, caw, caw!"
And they all flapped their wings and cried,
"Billy McGee, McGaw."
Said one old crow unto his mate,
"What shall we do for grub to ate?"
"There lies a horse on yonder plain
Who was by some cruel butcher slain.
"We'll perch ourselves on his backbone,
And pick his eyes out one by one."