US & Canadian Versions: 24. Bonnie Annie
[Only Phillips Barry has found what he considers to be fragments of this ballad (see discussion by Coffin below). The song is related to Captain Glen/The New York Trader and perhaps Barry's versions are from that ballad.
The following is from Coffin's 1950 book, A Critical Biographical Study of the Traditional Ballads of North America:
R. Matteson 2012, 2014]
24. BONNIE ANNIE
Barry, (BFSSNE, X, II and XI, 9) printed two Maine fragments which he believed belong to Child 24, Bonnie Annie. The very lines,
Captain take gold, and captain take money
Captain take gold, but leave me my honey. -X, ii.
cannot be found in the Child texts, but may well be from an American version of the Jonah-like story about the girl who elopes with her lover, only to be cast off the floundering ship in a storm. However, the second set of lines,
He kissed her cold lips a thousand times o'er
And called her his darling, though she was no more. -XI, 9.
belong to the Robson-Colwell comic ballad, Fillikins and his Dinah. The informant did place them in the same song with the first two lines, and Barry (XI, 9 10) attempts to rationalize this as corruption. My opinion is that such fragments are too brief to prove much.
----------------
BONNIE ANNIE
(Child 24)
Fragment, sung June 28, 1935,by Dr. Rose Davis (Ph.D.), Brewer, Maine, learned from her mother, who had it in turn of Mrs. Martin Golden, native of County Galway. Transcribed from dictaphone record by P. B.
1 "Captain, take gold, and, captain, take money,
Captain, take gold, but leave me my honey !"
Miss Davis's fragment is the only known record of this ballad in America. Bonnie Annie is of a group of homiletic ballads on the efficiency of the sacrament of penance, including the Scandinavian ballads, Jon Remordsins Dod, paa Haaaet ("John Remordsson's Death at Sea'), Her Peders Sjorbsa (Sir Peter's Sea Voyage"), a number of Slavic ballads, and Child 57, Brown Robyn's Confession The homiletic purpose of these ballads, "the greater the sin, the more saving the sinner's penancer" is best preserved in Brown Robyn's Confession; if is elsewhere more or less obscured or lost. Thus in Sir Patrich Spens (Child 58), the hero's tragic fault is not a mortal sin, but contempt for a sailor's superstition, while in the case of Bonnie Annie, no text
makes clear that, according to folkways, she has done anything woithy of death. It is not a mortal sin of balladry for an eloping maiden to follow the example of Jessica in providing with a dowry lifted from her father's ducats and her mother's jewels, while the mood of Child's C-text (ESPB., IV, pp. 452-3), which denounces Annie as an undutiful daughter, has something of that "lack of inner conviction" which Professor Belden (Sezeanee Reaieu, xix, pp. 218-27) saw as the hall-mark of the vulgar ballad.
We submit that Bonnie Annie is a late ballad of the Child type, set in the frame of the older homiletic ballads of the pattern of Brown Robyn's Confession. This is clear frorn the allusion in Child A, 6 rationalized in B, 13--to the stalling of the ship at sea, owing to the presence aboard of fey folk: a trait found in the Scandinavian ballads. This trait is of the hagiography in which both self-moving ships and balky ships are found (p. 8; The Magic Boat, JAFL., XXVIII, pp. 195 ff.) , and shows that the narrative in
Jonah I, which lacks it, is a collateral, rather than a direct source of the ballad story. The author of Bonnie Annie, however, who, we suspect, was, like the author of Bonnie Susie Cleland (Child 65, I),