Songs of the Carolina Charter Colonists, 1663-1763

Chapter III

Love Songs

[42] Some of the songs in this group are arbitrarily detached from the ballads (song stories) in Groups I and II. A few of them tell stories and thus are ballads. But in the songs that are to follow, love is a theme in and for itself. Some of them are pure lyrics, expressive of mood, emotion, passion, etc. Among the group are several of the most beloved songs in our language, three or four of them so familiar that summary of them would insult the reader. The number of such could be almost indefinitely expanded from songbooks, chap-books, garlands, etc., such as Tom D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy (1661), both compiler and compilation being at the heart of the court which issued the Charter to the Lords Proprietors in 1663; Ramsay’s The Ever Green and The Tea-Table Miscellany, from Scotland, about sixty years later; and James Johnson’s The Scot’s Musical Museum, published after the terminus of the century we are concerned with but reflecting the taste of an earlier age, and particularly rich in folksongs, Robert Burns being its greatest informant; and others which literate Englishmen and Scotsmen knew and used throughout the eighteenth century, and must have packed with their belongings if they brought any books at all to the New World.

But, regardless of these printed sources, the wallet of popular memory was doubtless stuffed with such songs. The songs lived on in popular oral tradition in North Carolina and must have come alive there, as Mary Johnston represents them in The Great Valley. This novel is the story of the journey of a Scots family (ca. 1765) across the Blue Ridge to their new home in the West. There the “fairly world” of the primeval wilderness reminds them of Thomas Rymer and the Queen of Elfland and of the Scots lassies Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, who built their bower beside a burn to [43] escape the plague, but were caught there. (See A. P. Hudson, “The Singing South,” Sewanee Review, July 1936, pp. 6-8.)

THE BANKS OF CLAUDIE (CLOUDY): Not in BCNCF but well known in the South, e. g., HFM 152. A lover disguises himself and tests his sweetheart’s fidelity after long absence by reporting his own death. Her protestations convince him.

CAROLINE OF EDINBURGH TOWN: An eighteenth-century ballad. BCNCF II.358-359; HFM 143-144. Widely known in this country. It solaced yellow-fever refugees in Mississippi in 1878. Caroline has been seduced by a young Highlander, who abandons her “to eat such food as she could find / Upon the bushes grow” and to drown herself.

CORN RIGS ARE BONNY: RTTM 119:

DUNT, DUNT, PITTIE PATTIE (Tune, “Yellow-hair’d Laddie”): RTTM 382:

[45] LEAVE OFF YOUR FOOLISH PRATING: RTTM 220-221:

LOVE WILL FIND OUT THE WAY: RTTM 146-147: In Percy’s Reliques, dated by Percy 1600, but suspected to have been “rewritten” by the good Bishop himself:

[47] OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY (Tune, “Over the Hills and Far Away”): RTTM 372.

PRETTY FAIR MAID: BCNCF II.304-305, IV.169-178 (music); SEFSA II.70-73 (5 te. and tu. from N. C.). One of the finest examples of the motif of the returned lover in disguise—sometimes called “A Sweetheart in the Army,” “The Single Sailor,” and “The Broken Token.” A sailor or soldier returning from overseas service tests the fidelity of his sweetheart by disguising himself and reporting himself dead, then, when the lady meets his test, identifying himself with a ring or coin they had broken.

SALLY IN OUR ALLEY: RTTM 204-205; by Henry Carey (1696-1743), who was chiefly famous for his songs in ballad and burlesque operas. The song was sketched by Carey as he observed a shoemaker’s apprentice and his sweetheart on a holiday.

THE SILK MERCHANT’S DAUGHTER: BCNCF 331-334; SEFSA I.381-384 (2 te. and tu. from N. C.). Originally a stall ballad, it has become traditional. It tells a story of a silk [48] merchant’s daughter who disguised herself as a merchant and sailed to the country of the Indians. During a storm at sea, lots are cast to determine who is the Jonah, and the lot falls on the lady, but the approach of a rescue ship saves her.

SWEET WILLIAM’S FAREWELL TO BLACK-EYED SUSAN: RTTM 198-199. By John Gay, published in 1720 by the author of The Beggars’ Opera. In good ballad style, this is one of the best songs of the eighteenth century. It is in nearly all anthologies of English verse.

THE TRUE LOVER’S FAREWELL: Not in BCNCF but it is well known in the South (e.g., HFM 170-171). Out of an earlier folk version Burns wrought the magic of “My Luve’s Like a Red, Red Rose.” For a beautiful handling of the traditional form, play “Fare Thee Well” in Joan Baez’s Vanguard Album VRS-9078.

VILLIKINS AND DINAH: BCNCF II.482-484, IV.203-204 (music). Originally a stall ballad of melodramatic plot and tone, it was burlesqued and has been widely sung in America. Dinah’s cruel father forces her to break off relations with Villikins for a wealthy suitor. She drinks “a cup of cold pizen ... and a billy ducks said ‘twas from pizen she died.” Villikins follows suit.

ROGER’S COURTSHIP: RTTM 329-330:

WALY, WALY, GIN LOVE BE BONNY: RTTM 153-154. This beautiful song was first published in the 1727 (1st) ed. of RTTM. It was reprinted in Percy’s Reliques. See CESPB note on “Jamie Douglas.” The author of the present book was unaware that it has ever been traditionally sung in North Carolina until, on July 20, 1962, meeting Mr. Manly Wade Wellman, a professional writer living in Chapel Hill, he fell into conversation with Mr. Wellman and invited him to record a “blockader’s” ballad from Madison County, and learned by accident that Mr. Wellman has recently heard a man in that county sing “Waly, Waly,” with the remark that he had learned it from his mammy. Told that the song is in Percy’s Reliques, the mountaineer said he “shore would like to see that Percy’s Relics.” Mr. Wellman could recall but two stanzas, and he kindly recorded them on that date for HCF (tape), along with “The Skye Boat Song” as sung by Mrs. Marjorie Blankenship Melton, of Chapel Hill and New London, who learned it in part from English school children in London in 1955 and has sung it to her son Geordie. There is a fine recording of another version of “Waly, Waly” sung by Kathleen Ferrier in English Songs and Folk Songs, London ffrr LS538.

[52] THE WEXFORD GIRL (THE OXFORD GIRL, etc.): BCNCF II. 240-246, IV.139-l44 (music). Originating as an eighteenth-century English broadside, and early published as a broadside in New England under the title “The Lexington Murder,” it has become the model of many American murder ballads (including North Carolina’s “Omie Wise,” “Nellie Cropsey,” and others). A man goes to his sweetheart’s house and on the pretext of discussing their wedding day with her, leads her into the country, and there with a stake or fence rail beats her to death and throws her into a river. In the last stanza he bespeaks his fear of the gallows.