What care I for your golden treasures? Patience, servant girl (VA) c.1780
[From "John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773-1833: A Biography. . ." by William Cabell Bruce - 1922. A single stanza of "Madam" was memorized by John Randolph from c.1780 when he was a young boy that was sung to him then by a "mulatto servant girl of my Cousin Patsy Banister, called Patience. . ." The age of the stanza suggests the possibility that the English broadsides of Madam from London in the 1760s were not the earliest versions.
R. Matteson 2017]
Here's the complete excerpt from "John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773-1833: A Biography. . ." by William Cabell Bruce - 1922:
A peculiar intimacy existed between John and one of the younger Banisters, and, in a letter to his niece, Elizabeth Tucker Coalter, dated Feb. 20, 1822, he furnishes us with some interesting evidence of his familiar footing, when a boy, with his Banister kin. "Do you know," he asks her, "a ballad that used to be sung to me, when I was a child, by a mulatto servant girl of my Cousin Patsy Banister, called Patience, about a rich suitor offering 'his lands so broad' and his golden store to a girl of spirit whose reply was somehow thus?
What care I for your golden treasures?
What care I for your house and land?
What care I for your costly pleasures?
So as I get but a handsome man.
Perhaps, old Aggy, who was my dear and honored mother's hand-maiden in 1769, when my father led her a spotless and blushing virgin to the altar, can remember it. I pry' thee get me that ballad. I can give you the tune." What could be more, to use one of Randolph's own phrases, a la Virginienne than the figures which this delightful scrap of retrospection brings before us; the "sassy" yellow girl disdainfully tossing her head, and yet but partly smothering the amorous glow behind her half-closed lids as she sings, the aged retainer, of whom we shall hear more anon, handed down from mother to daughter, and from daughter to granddaughter, and cherished not only for the sake of her own dog-like fidelity and simple virtues, but for the sake of the sacred dead, whose tire-woman she first was, and the old slave-holder, for even at forty-eight John Randolph was an old man in everything but years, still carrying in his memory, the words, and in his heart, the melody, of the bye-gone plantation ditty, unheard by his material ear, except perhaps when hummed by himself, for upwards of forty winters.