What Blood Is That? Frye (NC) 1945 Brown C
[My title. From Brown Collection of NC, 1952; one of four versions from Vol. 2 and Vol. 4. Brown editors' notes follow.
R. Matteson 2012, 2014]
7. Edward (Child 13)
Although 'Edward' in the version from which it is named stands at or near the head of English balladry in beauty and power, it is neither very old — Percy's print of 1765 is the earliest record of it — nor very frequent in tradition — Child knew but two versions and a fragment — nor, apart from the Percy and Motherwell versions, a very notable ballad. Percy had his version. Child's B, from Sir David Dalrymple; and the skill and dramatic power of its structure, especially its revelation of the whole meaning of the story in the final stanza, has occasioned doubt of its being really a "popular," i.e., a folk ballad, at least in this version.* The only record of it in modern England is in the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society iii (1938) 205-6, where Miss A. G.
[* Professor Archer Taylor, Edward mid Sven i Rosengaard (University of Chicago Press, 1931), has analyzed all the versions — English, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and American — and concludes that the Percy-Dalrymple form is not the original form, though he thinks that the ballad originated in Britain and traveled to Scandinavia. Later, Professor Bertrand H. Bronson (SFLQ iv [1940] 1-13 and 159-61 ) argues with considerable force that the Percy version is a form of conscious art, especially in its climax, where it is revealed that the murder was devised by the mother. To these it might be added that in no other version is it the father that has been killed; commonly it is a brother, and frequently on no other provocation than his having cut down a bush. The Scandinavian texts are numerous but generally late; Olrik mentions a "comic" text in a manuscript of the 1640's and a parody of it printed as a broadside in 1794, but the other Scandinavian texts were taken down in the nineteenth century.]
Gilchrist gives a seven-stanza text as sung in a Cheshire "Soul-Caking," that is, the Cheshire form of the St. George mumming. In this country it has been found in Virginia (TBV 120-9, SharpK I 50-2, SCSM 183-4), Tennessee (SharpK i 47-8), North Carolina (SharpK 1 46-7, 49, 53), South Carolina (SCSM 181-2), Florida (FSF 248-50), Mississippi (FSM 70-2), Texas (in a release of the University of Texas News Service dated March 24 [1941?]), the Ozarks (OMF 207-8, OFS i 124-6), Ohio (BSD 23-4), and California (CFLQ V 310-11 ). Most of the texts, both from the English-speaking and from the Scandinavian countries, end with a series of bequests, a feature which this ballad shares with 'Lord Randal,' 'The Two Brothers,' and 'Lizzie Wan.' Many texts, the Scandinavian especially, have various ways of saying "never" when the son is asked when he will return from exile — or death.
C. [What Blood Is That?] No title. One of the songs collected in the summer of 1945 by Professors W. Amos Abrams and Gratis D. Williams from Pat Frye of East Branch, Yadkin county. See the headnote to 'Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight' G.
[Listen: http://contentdm.library.appstate.edu/docapp/abrams/field_recordings/edward.html]
1 'What blood is that on your knife?
My youngest son, come tell this to me.'
'It is the blood of my old horse
Who's plowed the fields for me, me, me,
Who's plowed the fields for me.'
2 'It is too red for ye[1] old horse's blood.
My youngest son, come tell this to me.'
'It is the blood of my old dog
Who runs the deer for me, me, me,
Who runs the deer for me.'
3 'It is too red for ye[1] old dog's blood.
My youngest son, come tell this to me.'
'It is the blood of my little brother
Who's walked the roads with me, me, me,
Who's walked the roads with me.'
4 'What did you and your little brother fall out about?
My youngest son, come tell this to me.'
'For cutting down my hazel[2] nut bush,
Which might-a made a tree tree tree,
Which might-a made a tree.'
5 'What will you do when your father finds it out?
My youngest son, come tell this to me.'
'I'll step my foot in yonders boat
And sail across the sea sea sea.
And sail across the sea.'
6 'When will you ever return back?
My youngest son, come tell this to me.'
1 So the manuscript. Probably meant to give Frye's pronunciation of "your."
2. Of all the versions in SharpK only No. 8H, 51 refers to the "hazel-nut tree." All others have "holly-bush."
And there the text as reported ends. Whether Frye was tired of singing it or the reporters simply forgot to finish this last stanza the editor does not know. [tape cut off in the middle of the last verse]