Waco Girl- Esther Anderson (OK-TX) 1906 Anderson
[From: "The Waco Girl": Another Variant of a British Broadside Ballad by John Q. Anderson; Western Folklore, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Apr., 1960), pp. 107-118; Published by: Western States Folklore Society. Anderson's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2016]
I have known the version given below since my childhood in the early 1920's in Wheeler County in the Texas Panhandle. My sister, Esther Anderson Shinn, who taught it to me, says that she first heard it about 1906 from our aunt, Ethel Collins Anderson, a native of Catoosa in northeast Oklahoma. It is recorded on tape in the Library of Congress, Washington; the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music, Indiana University; and in the Archives of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin.
THE WACO GIRL- Esther Anderson Shinn, who taught it to me, says that she first heard it about 1906 from our aunt, Ethel Collins Anderson, a native of Catoosa in northeast Oklahoma.
Down by the city of Waco
I used to live and dwell;
Down by the city of Waco
I owned a flour mill.
While going with a Waco girl
With dark and rolling eyes,
And calling at her sister's house
To take her by surprise.
I told her that we'd take a walk
And view the meadows so gay
And also have a social talk
And name our wedding day.
We walked along, we talked along
'Till we came to the level ground,
And picking me up a hackwood stick
I knocked that fair maid down.
And falling on her bending knees
"O Lord, have mercy," she cried;
"O Willie, my dear, don't murder me here;
I'm not prepared to die."
But paying no attention to her pleading words,
I beat her more and more
'Till the blood around her yellow hair
Stood all out in a gore.
Then picking her up by the yellow hair
I swung her round and round
And taking her down to the still water deep,
I threw her in to drown.
And turning on my journey home
At twelve o'clock that night,
My mother being worried
Woke all up in a fright.
"O Willie, my son what have you done
To bloody your hands and clothes?"
The answer that I gave her
Was bleeding at the nose.
And asking for a candle
To light my way to bed
And also for a kerchief
To bind my aching head.
I tossed and I tumbled,
No comfort could I find;
The devil and his angels
Around my bed did climb.
About six weeks or later
That Waco girl was found
A-floating down the still water deep
She had floated to Oxford town.
And taking me on suspicion
They locked me up in jail;
No one to speak a loving word,
No one to go my bail.
Her sister swore my life away,
She swore without a doubt
That I was the very lad
Who'd taken her sister out.
O Lord, they're going to hang me;
It's an awful death to die;
O Lord, they're going to hang me
Between this earth and sky.