US & Canada Versions 7B. Love Has Brought Me To Despair (False Lover; Auxville Love)
[There are six extant US versions of "Love Has Brought Me To Despair" and none from Canada. All the versions are based on, or similar to, the broadside of c. 1686 titled "The Constant Lady and the False-Hearted Squire." The versions are all corrupt and show the influence of the Died for Love ballads:
1. Berzilla Wallin's ballad has the "my apron just won't tie" stanza and the "street[house] in yonders town" stanza.
2. Two versions have the standard Died for Love ending: "Go dig my grave both wide and deep,"
Two versions have borrowing from Unfortunate Swain/Picking Lilies, the stanza with the picking of flowers of different colors.
In general the text from the US is closer to "The Constant Lady" and there is less borrowing from the Died for Love ballads than the versions collected in the UK.
Cox detailed notes in his 1925 Folk Songs of the South failed to identify "Constant Lady" and therefore his notes suffer greatly. For example Cox says Sheffield Park "is the direct ancestor of The Butcher Boy" and tries to find other broadsides to which his text is related. In 1940 Belden (see his notes at teh bottom of this page) correctly identified "Constant Lady" as the source broadside but failed to name "Love Has Brought Me To Despair" as a version based on it. However, it's clear that "Love Has Brought Me To Despair" is one such ballad. Brewster's notes don't mention "Constant Lady" and even the Traditional Ballad index fails to mention the broadside.
For a closer look at the fundamental broadside "The Constant Lady and the False-Hearted Squire" and details of the ballad notes see: Main Headnotes for "Love Has Brought Me To Despair."
R. Matteson 2017]
CONTENTS: (To access texts with notes click on the blue highlighted title below or the title attached to this page on the left-hand column)
1) Love Has Brought Me To Despair- R. Welch (WV) 1859 Cox
2) Love Has Brought Me To Despair- S. Hubbard (UT) 1874 Hubbard
3) Auxville Love- Robin Cornett (KY) c.1921 Combs
4) False Lover- Mrs. Hopkins (IN) 1935 Brewster A
5) False Lover- Mary J. Shriver (IL) 1935 Brewster B
6) Love Has Brought Me To Despair- Berzilla Wallin (NC) 1963 REC
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[Folk-Songs of the South - Page 430, John Harrington Cox notes]
144 LOVE HAS BROUGHT ME TO DESPAIR
This is a remarkably full version of the English song "A Brisk Young Sailor " — that song which, in an abbreviated form, is known as "There is an alehouse in yonder town" (or, in this country, as "There is a tavern in the town"). For English texts, longer or shorter, see Bebbington's broadside No. 193 (Manchester); Kidson, Traditional Tunes, pp. 44, 46; Leather, The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire, p. 205 ; Sharp, One Hundred English Folksongs, No. 94; Sharp, English Folk Songs, n, 40; R. Vaughan Williams, Folk-Songs from the Eastern Counties, p. 9; Butterworth, Folk Songs from Sussex, p. 14; Broadwood, English Traditional Songs and Carols, p. 92; Kidson and Neal, English Folk-Song and Dance, p. 57; Journal of the Folk-Song Society ,1, 252; 11, 155, 158, 168; in, 188; v, 181, 183, 184, 188.
The usual opening of the song (when it does not begin at once with the alehouse, stanza 4 of the present text) is as follows — to quote the Bebbington broadside:
A brisk young sailor courted me,
He stole away my liberty,
He stole my heart with a free good will,
I must confess I love him still.
Instead of this, the West Virginia version has three quite different stanzas.
These seem to be adapted from some form of the old ballad entitled "The
Famous Flower of Serving-Men" (Child, No. 106), in which we find:
2 I was by birth a lady fair,
My father's chief and onely heir,
But when my good old father dy'd,
Then was I made a young knight's bride.
5 My servants all from me did flye,
In the midst of my extremity,
And left me by my self alone,
With a heart more cold then any stone.
19 My father was as brave a lord
As ever Europe did afford;
My mother was a lady bright,
My husband was a valient knight.
One English text {Folk-Song Society ; n, 158) agrees in part with the West Virginia song at this point, having as stanza 1 :
Her father bin a noble knight:
Her mother bin a lady bright:
I bin an only child of her
False lover brought me to despair.
Stanzas 8-10 of our West Virginia text recur in the English broadside ballad "Sheffield Park" (Catnach; Jackson & Son, Birmingham; Gillington, Eight Hampshire Folk-Songs, p. 14), which is the direct ancestor of "The Butcher Boy" (see p. 430, below). These stanzas, however, are all found in some other versions of "A Brisk Young Sailor." The opening stanza of "Sheffield Park" runs as follows:
In Sheffield Park O there did dwell
A brisk young lad, I loved him well,
He courted me my love to gain,
He 's gone and left me full of pain.
The concluding stanza in the West Virginia text, though found in several of the English versions, probably does not belong to this piece. It is a ballad commonplace. In "The Forlorn Lover," for instance, a seventeenth-century broadside lament, which shows some elusive resemblance to our song, we find :
O dig me a grave that is wide, large, and deep,
With a turf at my head, and another at my feet!
There will I lie, and take a lasting sleep,
And so bid her Farewel for ever. [1]
A similar stanza, or stanzas, occurs also in several versions of "The Twa Brothers" (Child, No. 49) and of "Sir Hugh" (Child, No. 155).
"A Brisk Young Sailor" has significant points of contact with the seventeenth-century broadside (Pepys, v, 217) "An excellent New Song, called Nelly's Constancy; or, Her Unkind Lover" (Ebsworth, Roxburghe Ballads, vr, 791).
For references see Journal, xxix, 170; Broadwood, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, v, 185.
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Laws; American Balladry from British Broadsides 1957:
P 25 LOVE HAS BROUGHT ME TO DESPAIR The narrator overhears a girl complaining that her false lover has brought her to despair. She goes to the meadow to find a flower to ease her mind, but none of them does so. After making a bed of flowers
she lies down. She asks for a marble stone at her head and a turtle dove on her breast, and then she dies for love.
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[Belden's Notes 1940, Ballads and Songs]
One other feature, frequent in English ballads having a similar story but not found in any text[1] of The Butcher Boy, should be mentioned. In two seventeenth century broadsides, The Deceased Maiden Lover and The Constant Lady and False-hearted Squire (Roxburghe Ballads I 260-2 and VIII 635-6), in Sheffield, Park (Pitts; also in oral tradition in Hampshire, see above), in Lancashire and Hertfordshire texts of A Brisk Young Sailor (JFSS V 183-9), in the Dorset There was Three Worms on Yonder Hill, in an Essex text of Died for Love (JFSS II 158-9)--all having a story something like that of The Butcher Boy--the girl does not hang herself but, like Ophelia, goes in search of flowers to cure the wounds of love[2] makes a bed of them, and dies thereon (or, sometimes, dies and is covered with flowers and grass by her loving mistress). This element appears also in an otherwise unrelated song from North Carolina, Dearest Billie (MSNC 7).
1. Rather, in any printed text. In two texts privately communicated to me by Barry in 1917, one from, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and one from Deerfieid, Massachusetts, the girl runs thru the meadows gathering flowers, for
There is a flower that I've heard say
'Tis called hearts-ease both night and day,
And if that flower I could find,
'Twould ease my heart and please my mind.
The former of these has also the 'apron high' motif.
2. The folklore of flowers and herbs is too complex and too vague to be dealt with here; see PMLA XXXIII 359-67. As de Gubernatis (Mythologie des Plantes I 131), Ovid knew that there were no simples that could cure these wounds:
Me miseram, quod amor non est medicabilis herbis Heroid. V 149
Ei mihi, quod nullis amor est sanabilis herbis Metam,I 523