An Old Love Song- Harris (NC) c.1920 Brown B
[From The Brown Collection of NC Folklore, Vol. 2, 1953. The editor's notes follow. This is a version of "The Storms are on the Ocean," which has enough elements of "The Lass of Roch Royal" to be related to the ballad.
R. Matteson 2012, 2015]
The Lass of Roch Royal
(Child 76)
North Carolina shares with many other regions of the United States a fondness for the "Who will shoe my pretty little foot" motive in love songs. These songs are separately considered in Vol. III, nos. 250, 253, 254, 302, 307. Only West Virginia shares with it the distinction of preserving a genuine version of the ballad. See Cox's headnote in FSS and Combs's text in FSMEU. Both of these are variants of one version, most nearly allied to Child's D; and so are the two texts from North Carolina, both of which were secured by Miss Maude Minish before she became Mrs. Sutton. All four of the texts are clearly variants of one version, yet no two are identical. It is an interesting exercise in the ways of oral tradition to compare the four. One stanza — stanza 2 of A and the "chorus" of B — of the North Carolina texts is not found in any of the versions in Child nor in those from West Virginia. It is found, however, in some of the fragmentary folk lyric in North Carolina and elsewhere; see 'The Storms Are on the Ocean,' in volume III.
B. 'An Old Love Song.' Just when Mrs. Sutton got this text does not appear, but evidently it was after she heard A, for in the notes to that text she says that she has never found the ballad elsewhere. She got it from Jim Harris of Caldwell county, whom her father designated as a "jackleg preacher," living in "the Richlands, ... a cove dropped down off the side of the Blue Ridge— poor, lonely, barren, but indescribably beautiful. . . . His wife is a poet. He told me she was. . . . She writes of religion — a harsh covenanting type, and her husband preaches of eternal damnation. The thing he liked about the old ballad was the death its heroine met. 'The wages of sin,' he said darkly."
1 'Oh, who will shoe my little feet?
And who will glove my hand?
And who will kiss my ruby lips,
When you're in a foreign land?'
Chorus [1]: The Storms are on the ocean,
The sea begins to roll,
The earth may lose its motion
Ere I prove false to thee.
2 'Papa can shoe your pretty little foot.
And mama can glove your little hand,
And I will kiss your ruby lips
When I come home again.'
3 I will get me a bonny boat
And sail on the salt, salt sea;
For I must go to my own true love,
For he will not come to me.'
4 She took her young son in her arms
And to his door she has gone.
She knocked and cried and knocked again
But answer she got none.
5 'Go open the door, my old true love,
Go open the door, I pray,
For your young child that's in my arms
Will be dead before it's day.'
6 'Away, away, you bad woman,
For here you cannot stay.
Go drown yourself in the ocean deep,
Or hang on the gallows tree.'
7 'Oh, have you forgot, my old true love,
When we sat at the wine?
We changed the rings from our fingers,
And I can show you mine.
8 'And have you forgot, my old true love.
The oath that you swore to me?
The oath that was strong, and bound us both
For the years that are to be?'[2]
9 When the cock he crowed and the sun come up
And through the blinds did creep,
Then up he got, her own true love,
And loudly he did weep.
10. 'I dreamed a dream of my old true love,
She lives across the sea.
I dreamed she stood at my own front door
A-weeping piteously.'
11. Oh, he went down to the salt, salt sea
And looked across the foam.
He saw the boat of his own true love
A-tossin' toward her home.
12 He called her name and he stretched his arms;
He begged her sore to stay.
But the more he sobbed and the more he wept
The boat was further away.
13 The wind blew hard and the sea got rough;
It tossed the boat ashore.
His own true love the waves washed up;
Her babe was seen no more.
14 Her pretty cheeks were ashy gray,
And golden was her hair.
But cold as clay was her rosy lips;
No breath of life was there.
15 The first that he kissed was her revely[3] cheek.
The next that he kissed was her chin,
But the last of all her cold clay lips.
That had no breath in them.
1. Dr. Brown notes on the manuscript: "Sung after the first verse and every third verse thereafter."
2. Dr. Brown notes: "I suspect the poet wife of this last line. It does not ring true."
3. This word has appeared earlier, in the C text of 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William.' Mr. Brewster in a letter to me suggests that it may be a corruption of "raddled," perhaps through such intermediate forms as "raddledy," "ruddledy."