Three Babes- Rice (NC) 1916 Sharp F
[My title, replacing the generic Child title. Single stanza w/music from Cecil Sharp; English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians; Sharp/Campbell I, 1917; also Sharp/Karpeles I; 1932. The 1932 Edition notes follow.
R. Matteson 2015]
No. 22. The Wife of Usher's Well.
Texts without tunes:—Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, No. 79. Journal of American Folk-Lore, xiii. 119; xxiii. 429; xxx. 305; xxxix. 96. Cox's Folk Songs of the South, p. 88.
Texts with tunes:—E. M. Leather's Folk-Lore of Herefordshire, p. 198. Davis's Traditional Ballads of Virginia, pp. 278 and 576.
See also The Cruel Mother (No. 10), Tune B. McGill's Folk Songs of the Kentucky Mountains, p. 5. Texts A and B are remarkable in that the children cite the mother's 'proud heart' as the reason that has caused them to 'lie in the cold clay', a motive which is absent from other English and Scottish versions.
F. [Three Babes] Sung by Mrs. ZIPPO RICE at Rice Cove, Big Laurel, N. C, Aug. 15, 1916
Hexatonic. Mode 2, b.
There was a woman of the North,
She had but three babes;
She sent them a way to the priest of the North
To learn their grammar through.