Three Crows- M. McAllister (VA) 1935 Wilkinson B
[From Bronson, No. 13. Wilkinson made transcriptions of both Lucy McAllister and Marybird McAllister when he was working Virginia Folklore Society from 1935-36. He worked closely with Kyle Davis Jr. and with Paul Clayton who arrived at the University of Virginia in 1949 and studied Davis, a scholar of folksongs and author/editor of 1929’s Traditional Ballads of Virginia. Later, as a graduate student, Clayton helped produce More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, writing deeply researched headnotes and transcribing tapes buried in the archives of the Virginia Folklore Society.
George Foss, who died recently, made recordings of Mary Bird McAllister in the early 1960s and published a booklet: From White Hall to Bacon Hollow, about the Virginia region. Here is the intro:
"From White Hall to Bacon Hollow is about a place and about its culture and people. I have granted myself the author's indulgence of selecting a title significant in its double meaning. White Hall to Bacon Hollow is a stretch of twisting country road, Virginia route 810, crossing the line between Albemarle and Greene Counties. Heading west from Charlottesville toward Staunton across the mountains in the valley of Virginia and the Shenandoah River, turn north through the small industrial town of Crozet past orchards of apples and peaches and fields of corn and rye to a small country store in the fork of the road which is White Hall. From there the road winds ever closer to the mountains northward some twenty miles to Bacon Hollow. This region is bounded on the west by the southernmost section of the Skyline Drive and nestles into the gaps and coves which reach up to the Shenandoah National Park line near the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The main road is met by many dirt and rocky roads which reach up into the climbing crevices of the Great Blue Ridge on the left and down into the lesser mountains and foot hills back to the east. This is the place and the home of the people I have come to know so well. Whitehall also has a second meaning for me, as the great palace of the Tudor kings and queens of England. It was the cultural center of the English Renaissance at the time the very ballads and songs which I was seeking in the Virginia Blue Ridge originated or were in popular currency. Whitehall is still mentioned in some of the classic ballads sung in that region."
I believe Marybird and Lucy to be blood sisters although they may be sisters through marriage. Marybird's version has the "Apple" stanza found in the old 1863 minstrel parody, The Four Vultures.
R. Matteson 2014]
Three Crows [The Three Ravens]- Wilkinson MSS., 1935-36, p. 32(B). Sung by Mrs. Mary[bird] McAllister, Grottoes, Va., October 30, 1935.
There were three crows sat on yonder's tree.
They're just as black as crows can be.
One of them said to the mate:
What shall we do for grub to eat?
There's an old dead horse in yonder's lane,
Whose body has been lately slain.
We'll fly upon his old breast bone,
And pluck his eyes out one by one.
Old Satan tried to injure me
By cutting down my apple tree.
He could not injure me at all,
For I had apples all the fall.