US & Canada Versions: 78. The Unquiet Grave
[The Unquiet Grave, not a local title, is rare in North America. Versions from Newfoundland were first published in the early 1930s. Aside from Newfoundland, legitimate versions of ballad are few.
Of the 15 extant versions from North America, six are of questionable or undocumented authenticity: Davis (ballad recreation by Smiths); Niles (3 versions- all questionable), Blue Sky Boys (unknown) and Jean Ritchie (probably taken from print, provided by Uncle Jason?). One (Greenlead B) is a single stanza, another (Halpert's Shakespeare's Ghost from NJ) is a fragment and the Flanders NY version has no supporting documentation (Delorme knew ballads from tradition and print). That leaves us with six authentic versions of any length and quality. Four of the six are from Newfoundland; leaving only two versions from the US.
The Blue Sky Boys (William and Earl Bolick of Hickory, NC) recorded a version titled "Unquiet Grave" and also "Twelve Months and a Day" in 1965. It's unclear at this time whether their version is from tradition.
R. Matteson 2015]
CONTENTS: (To access individual versions click on highlighted title below or on title on left-hand column attached to this page)
1) The Broken-Hearted Lover- Smiths (VA) c.1847 Davis -- From Davis; More Traditional Ballads of Virginia; 1960. A ballad recreation- contributed by R. E. Lee Smith, of Palmyra, Va. Sung by his brother, Thomas P. Smith, of Palmyra, Ya., and himself. Fluvanna County. December 1912. Learned from the singing of Mrs. Chaney Smith, who heard it sung by her mother seventy years before.
2) The Green Grave- Nolan (KY) 1913 Niles C -- From The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles; 1961. Sung by William and Belinda Nolan (Science Hill, Pulanski County, KY) 1913. This could be traditional- or it could be an arrangement from tradition- or it could be a ballad recreation- as always it's hard to tell with Niles.
3) The Restless Grave- Barnett c.1913 Brown Collection -- From Brown Collection of NC Folklore; Vol. 2, 1952. Reported by Mrs. Sutton from the singing of Myra Barnett (Mrs. J. J. Miller) of King's Creek in the Brushies, Caldwell county, apparently in 1913 or thereabouts.
4) The Unquiet Grave- White (NL) 1929 Greenleaf A -- Not a local title. From Ballads and Sea-Songs of Newfoundland By Elizabeth Bristol Greenleaf, Grace Yarrow Mansfield- 1933. Sung by Mrs. Rosie White, Sandy Cove, Newfoundland; 1929.
5) Auld Song from Cow Head- Bull (NL) 1929 Greenleaf B -- Single stanza with music from Ballads and Sea-Songs of Newfoundland By Elizabeth Bristol Greenleaf, Grace Yarrow Mansfield- 1933. Sung by Rev. Gibbs Bull, Exploits, Newfoundland, 1929.
6) O, Cold Is The Wind- Day (NL) 1929 Karpeles -- My title, replacing the generic title. From: Folk Songs from Newfoundland; Karpeles, 1934. Sung by Mrs. Maggie Day at Fortune Harbour, 1st October 1929.
7) The Wind Blew Up- Netter (KY) 1934 Niles A --
Resurrected Sweetheart- Cottrell (KY) c1936 Niles
The Unquiet Grave- Clevenger (NJ) 1937 Halpert
Shakespeare's Ghost- Grant (NJ) 1938 Halpert
Cold Blows the Winter's Wind- Delorme (NY) 1943
Cold Falling Drops Of Dew- Decker (NL) 1959 Peacock B
The Unquiet Grave- Kinslow (NL) 1959 Peacock A
The Unquiet Grave- Ritchie (KY) 1961 Recording
The Unquiet Grave- William/Earl Bolick (NC) 1965
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[Notes by Davis; More Traditional Ballads of Virginia; 1960. Unfortunately for Davis, this is a ballad recreation by the Smiths. For more details see: Broken-Hearted Lover- Smiths (VA).]
THE UNQUIET GRAVE
(Child, No. 78)
A full discussion of this ballad and a first publication of its rare Virginia text by the present editor appeared in " 'The Unquiet Grave': A New-old Ballad from Virginia," English Studies in Honor of James Southall Wilson, university of Virginia Studies, IV (Charlottesville, Va., 1951), 99-110.
The ballad seems to be widespread in England, and is known in Scotland, but is extremely rare in American tradition. Child prints nine British versions: from Sussex, Suffolk (two), from Buchan's MSS. (Scotland), 'in Gipsy tents,' from Shropshire, from Cornwall, from Devonshire, and an additional fragment from Scotland. More recent English collectors- Cecil Sharp, Lucy E. Broadwood, A. G. Gilchrist, E. M. Leather, and Alfred Williams among others, have added more than a dozen English versions or variants, many of them with tunes. (See Davis article cited above for detailed references.) "This ballad, of which I have collected a large number of variants," says Sharp in one Hundred English Folk songs (p.xxvii), "is widely known and sung by English folksingers." On the other hand, no version of the song appears in the best known recent collection from Scottish sources, that of Gavin Greig and Alexander Keith, a fact which points to the more strongly English character and wider English currency of the song. Child surveys with his usual impressive scholarship the counterparts to this ballad in the popular traditions not only of the Scots but of the Persians, Indians, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and the Germanic and Latin races.
Traces of the ballad in North America are few indeed. Greenleaf and Mansfield (pp. 25-26) found it in Newfoundland in 1929 (one full version and a one-stanza fragment, each with a tune); Niles apparently found it among the Kentucky hill-folk in 1936; in 1937 Halpert recorded a four-and-a-half-stanza version, plus tune, in New Jersey; and the Brown collection of 1952 (II 94,95) presents a text, without tune, from North Carolina. The manuscript of the Virginia text states that it was learned by the Smiths in December, 1912. and was sung by Mrs. Chaney Smith's mother seventy years before that. Perhaps the Virginia text may claim some sort of recorded North American priority. Most versions of the ballad are brief: six or seven stanzas, sometimes less, the longest (Child H) only eleven stanzas. The fact that several of these stanzas are very nearly repetitions of certain stanzas in "Sweet William's Ghost" (Child, No. 77) and "The Two Brothers" (Child, No. 49) has led Child to a suspicion "that this brief little piece is an aggregation of scraps." But he parts the suspicion aside, supposing instead that the ballad has survived only in an imperfect form. "Even such as it is, however," he rightly concludes, "this fragment has a character of its own" (II, 234). He might have spoken even more strongly if he had examined the numerous versions taken down from recent oral tradition, especially in England but also in America. Cecil Sharp, who knew many more texts and tunes of the ballad, speaks up much more strongly in commendation of it both as folk poetry and as folk music. See English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, pp. 99, 102, and elsewhere.
The ballad is essentially lyrical, but there is a basic story: A lover (man or woman) who has just lost his or her loved one makes a vow of mourning at the loved one's grave for a year and a day. At the end of that time, the dead lover asks who is weeping at the grave and disturbing his (her) rest. The living lover then identifies himself (herself) and craves one final kiss of the dead one's lips. The dead lover refuses, on the ground that the kiss of a dead person will mean death to the living. The ending is various: a direct end with the dead lover's refusal; a suggestion of the finality of death and the hopelessness of regaining former happiness in the symbol of the beautiful flower now withered; the ghost's more overt forbidding of such excessive mourning; sometimes (and less acceptably), the ghost's suggestion of patience and the consolation of religion.
The Virginia version is most closely related to Child A, but it seems artistically a finer ballad than Child A, because it lacks the pietistic-consolatory and distinctly anticlimactic final stanza of Child A:
"The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away."
In contrast, the Virginia text ends, as one would wish it to, with the moving flower symbolism of the withering of beauty and love in the finality of death. The dead loved one speaks the final words:
"It is down in yonder fields so green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The beautifulles' flower that ever was seen
Is withered now to a stalk."
Otherwise, there is a fairly close correspondency, stanza by stanza, to the first six stanzas of Child A-of course with many verbal variations. The two texts also agree in the important detail of the sex of the dead and living lovers. See the Davis article cited above for fuller detail.
The local Virginia title of "The Broken-Hearted Lover" is quite as appropriate as, if perhaps slightly less poetical than, Child's "The Unquiet Grave" or "The Restless Grave" of the North Carolina text. The Virginia title is, however, one also given to "The Dear Companion" and to other songs of frustrated love. Of the ballad, R. E,. Lee Smith writes, "I consider this a good song whether a ballad or not." He is right.
That the ballad is a rich repository of antique folklore or popular beliefs is clear: the talking ghost, the idea that excessive grieving for the dead interferes with their repose, the notion that the breath of a ghost smells strong and that the kiss of a dead person is fatal, the "magic-task" stanzas, the survival of the ancient troth-plight which binds the lovers even after death, and so on. ( See Child, Wimberly, Gerould, Davis, and others. ) Miss Wells (Tlte Ballad Tree, p. 145) even sees a Neoplatonic significance in the kiss of the clay-cold lips, and Miss Harvey (JEFDSS, IV, 63-64) asks whether it is permissible to see in the kiss a token of the return of the troth. In contrast to the inanity of many ballad ghosts, Gerould finds in the supernatural visitant of this ballad "exquisite poignancy" (The Ballad of Tradition, pp. 63-65) . The Virginia text-like other American texts of supernatural ballads, has lost some of these supernatural trappings but preserves the important ones and the essential character of the ballad.
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