126. I Wish My Love Was in a Ditch


126

I Wish My Love Was in a Ditch

This peculiarly forthright denunciation of an unfaithful mistress
is perhaps part of North Carolina's Scottish inheritance. At any
rate the song 'I Wish My Love Was in a Mire' in Jamieson's
Popular Ballads and Songs (1806) i 350 has a like content, though
not much verbal resemblance.^ I have not found it elsewhere. It
is not the sort of thing that the ballad press commonly prints. The
singer is the same who sang 'The Wee Wee Man,' p. 47 above.

'I Wish My Love Was in a Ditch.' Sung by Mr. Saunders of Salem,
Forsyth county, who said that his grandfather had known more stanzas
but that he himself had forgotten them.

I I wish my love was in a ditch
Without no clothing to her.
With nettles up and down her back.
Because she was not truer.

* Still further removed from our text is the song of like title in Herd's
Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (i 235 of the 1869 reprint), which
is decidedly "literary" in tone.

 

362 NORTH CAROLINA FOLKLORE

2 She kissed me with her red, red lips,
She swore she would be mine O ;

But she swore the same to Alan O'Chree,
Who lives way down the line O.

3 Her belly grew big, her face grew pale,
But it was no fault of mine O ;

It must have been that Alan O'Chree
Who lives way down the line O.

4 She swore the brat was mine alone,
And sQon enough we were wed.

But I swear by the light of Kincastle Hill
She shall not share my bed.