Barbara Allan- Forget-Me-Not Songster (MA) c. 1845
[From The Forget-Me-Not Songster Boston, c. 1845. Cohen points out that there is a different Barbara Allen version printed in some songsters. At the bottom of the page is an excerpt from: The Forget-Me-Not Songsters and Their Role in the American Folksong Tradition by Norm Cohen.
R. Matteson 2012]
Barbara Allan- Forget-Me-Not Songster (MA) c. 1845 The Forget Me Not Songster, Containing a Choice Collection of Old Ballad Songs, as Sung by Our Grandmothers
It fell about the Martinmas day,
When the green leaves were falling.
Sir James the Graham in the west country
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.
She was a fair and comely maid,
And a maid nigh to his dwelling,
Which made him to admire the more,
The beauty of Barbara Allan.
O what's thy name my bonny maid,
Or where hast thou thy dwelling,
She answer'd him most modestly,
My name is Barbara Allan.
O see you not yon seven ships,
So bonny as they are sailing,
I'll make you mistress of them all,
My bonny Barbara Allan.
But it fell out upon a day,
At the wine as they were drinking,
They toasted their glasses around about,
And slighted Barbara Allan.
O she has taken't so ill out,
That she'd no more look on him.
And for all the letters he could send,
Still swore she'd never have him.
O if I had a man, a man,
A man within my dwelling,
That will write a letter with my blood,
And carry't to Barbara Allan.
Desire her to come here with speed,
For I am at the dying.
And speak one word to her true love,
For I'll die for Barbara Allan.
His man is off with all his speed,
To the place where she is dwelling,
Here's a letter from my master dear,
Gin ye be Barbara Allan.
O when she looked the letter upon,
With a loud laughter gi'd she,
But e'er she read the letter through,
The tear blinded her eye.
O hooly, hooly,[1] rose she up,
And slowly gaed she to him,
And slightly drew the curtains by,
Young man I think you're dying.
O I am sick, and very sick,
And my heart is at the breaking,
One kiss or two of thy sweet mouth,
Would keep me from the dying.
O mind you not young man, said she,
When you sat in the tavern,
Then you made the health go round,
And slighted Barbara Allan.
And slowly, slowly, rose she up,
And slowly, slowly left him,
And sighing said she could not stay,
Since death of life had reft him.
She had not gone a mile from the town,
Till she heard the dead bell knelling,
And every knell that dead bell gave,
Was wo to Barbara Allan.
Now when the virgin heard the same,
Sure she was greatly troubled,
When in the coffin his corpe she view'd,
Her sorrows all were doubled.
What! hast though died for me, she cried.
Let all true lovers shun me,
Too late I may this sadly say,
That death has quite undone me.
O, mother, mother make my bed,
O make it soft and narrow,
Since my love died for me to-day,
I'll die for him to-morrow.
1. Scottish for slowly, slowly (sometimes sung "slow-lie"). The fact that this is "hooly" instead of slowly" shows that it was taken from an earlier print source such as the Tea-Table Miscelleny (Child Aa, printed in Glasgow) which has that stanza and is nine stanzas total. Additional stanzas have been added and the first line and other places have been changed slightly. Neither version has the rose-and-briar ending.
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Excerpt from: The Forget-Me-Not Songsters and Their Role in the American Folksong Tradition
by Norm Cohen
American Music, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 137-219
5. "Barbara Allan"/"Bonny Barbara Allan" [Child 84] Most probably the best-known imported ballad in American folk tradition, "Barbara Allen" (spelled "Allan" in the songsters) has been collected in the field over 500 times in the last century. The earliest reference to it is an oftcited entry for January 2, 1666, in Samuel Pepys's Diary recording his evening at Lord Bruncker's: "... but, above all, my dear actress Mrs. Knipp, with whom I sang, and in perfect pleasure I was to hear her sing, and especially her little Scotch song of 'Barbary Allen.' "Pepys had first met Mrs. Elizabeth Knipp (also spelled Knepp) on the preceding December 6. She was beautiful, could sing, and had a very unpleasant husband-a triple threat in consequence of which the lusting diarist could not keep his hands off her. Their friendship rapidly escalated (or should one say, descended) into a degree of intimacy that soon became intolerable to Pepys's wife. On January 5, 1666:
" ... and so to Greenwich, and after sitting with them a while at their house, home, thinking to get Mrs. Knipp but could not, she being busy with company; but sent me a pleasant letter writing herself Barbary Allen;" and on the following day: " ... having wrote a letter to her in the morning, calling myself Dapper Dicky in answer to hers of Barb. Allen ... " The latter is (according to a footnote) a reference to another Scots song in which a girl laments her lover's absence.[67]
It has been argued that the January 2 reference was not to the traditional ballad: in a head note to the ballad, editor Belden wrote, Mrs. [Fannie Hardy] Eckstorm in a letter written in 1940 informed me that she and [Phillips] Barry had satisfied themselves, before Barry's death, that as sung by Mrs. Knipp to the delight of Samuel Pepys in 1666 it was not a stage song at all but a libel on Barbara Villiers and her relations with Charles II; but so far as I know the details of their argument have never been published. [68]
The absence of said details in this case rather reminds one of mathematician Fermat's handwritten marginal comment in his copy of a number theory textbook that he had discovered a marvelous proof of the theorem under discussion, but the margin was too narrow to contain it. Without any record of Eckstorm and Barry's evidence (and contrariwise the suggestive evidence in the two correspondents' use of ballad characters as noms-de-plume), we must reluctantly consign their comments to the dustbin of dubious demonstrations and assume that Pepys indeed heard the ballad that we know by that name. In any event, "Barbara Allen" has appeared in cheap print (broadsides, chapbooks, songsters) with such frequency that it is impossible to disengage the oral from the printed tradition. In his study, "'Barbara Allen': Cheap Print and Reprint, "Ed Cray reported that the FMNS version of "Barbara Allen" contained at least one stanza not present in any previous versions, whether from cheap print or oral sources. [69]
The opening stanza is:
It fell about the Martinmas day,
When the green leaves were falling,
Sir James the Graham in the west country
Fell in love with BarbaraA llan.
The fourth of the eighteen stanzas is the one Cray singled out as most distinctive:
O see you not yon seven ships,
So bonny as they are sailing,
I'll make you mistress of them all,
My bonny Barbara Allen.
(Notwithstanding the last line, the title of this version is "Barbara Allen," not "Bonny Barbara Allen.") From the fact that four recoveries from American folk tradition included this unique stanza, Cray concluded that those singers had learned their texts from the FMNSs- evidence to him of the significant impact of the songsters on oral tradition. Because none of the songsters with the "Bonny Barbara Allen" version was available to Cray at the time of his study, he was unaware of the complication of that second text, though its existence does not negate any of his conclusions.
The "Bonny Barbara Allen" version (in FMNS Types II, III, IV, VI, and VII, all probably dating from 1844-49) is only nine stanzas long. Its opening stanza is:
It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were falling,
That Sir John Greme in the west country
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.
It too has close (if not derivative) relatives among field-collected versions. But for some minor Americanizations in spelling, it is identical with a Glasgow broadside version printed in 1855. An editorial note on the latter claims it was taken from the fourth volume of Allan Ramsay's early and influential collection, Tea Table Miscellany, which is very close to it and even closer to the FMNS text. Also, except for spelling changes and a few textual differences, the text is the same as "Sir John Grehme and Barbara Allan. A Scottish Ballad" in Percy's Reliques. [70]
Something about the indifferent editorial practices of the compilers of the FMNSs can be concluded from the presence of both versions in three of the thirteen songster types. The source of the latter version can then be assumed to be earlier cheap print; but what of the source of the unique first version? Did its first typesetter (from whom later ones must have copied) have access to a now lost previous printed text? Did he himself (they were almost all men) know a traditional version? Did he make up the stanza? The latter possibility cannot be ruled out: many men of distinguished literary accomplishment (e.g., Ben Franklin) did service as printers and/or typesetters. The answer to this question is not presently at hand; we can hope that further research will provide it.
However, there is evidence that suggests that the FMNS text was not the first published with the added "seven ships" stanza. I base this assertion on a unique "Barbry Allen" written down by William A. Larkin(s) in 1866 in a manuscript collection of ballad and song texts and autograph verses.[71] Larkin's version is very close to the FMNS version-- including the (slightly altered) "ships" stanza-- though it contains sufficient differences to assure us that it was not copied directly from that source. In fact, two differences suggest that Larkin's comes directly from a predecessor of the FMNS text, and is actually superior to the latter as far as the narrative goes. One of these two differences involves the alteration of a single word; the other, the addition of two stanzas. The word in question appears in the fifth stanza, where the FMNS text reads:
But it fell out upon a day
At the wine as they were drinking
They toasted their glasses around about
And slighted Barbara Allan.
Here, the Larkin stanza replaces the pronoun "it"
with "they" (that is, the two lovers-not the "they" of the third line), which makes more sense story-wise. The added stanzas in Larkin's writing are the last two of the ballad. The FMNS version ends abruptly with
Oh mother, mother make my bed,
O make it soft and narrow,
Since my love died for me to-day,
I'll die for him, to-morrow.
The Larkin text has two more stanzas, ending with the common rose and brier motif-- a much neater conclusion. One hesitates to construct elaborate edifices on such slender foundations, but they are at the very least suggestive of an earlier source for the FMNS text.
A third, different version of "Barbara Allen" also appeared in some songsters of the same period. It contains eight double stanzas and begins with the half-stanza:
In Scarlet Town, where I was born,
There was a fair maid dwellin',
And every youth cried well awa'-
Her name was Barbara Allen. [72]
Footnotes:
67. See Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, a New Complete Transcription(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 7, 5, where the editors refer to British Museum H. 1601 (226) G 309 (66).
68. NCF 2:111. A one-page typescript in the Barry collection at Harvard's Houghton Library (box 13), signed PB., outlines the argument, but it was never published.
69. Cray," 'Barbara Allen."
70. Allan Ramsay, Tea Table Miscellany (Edinburghr, pt. 1750), 343, quoted by Albert B. Friedman, The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World (New York: Viking, 1956), 88; Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 3, vols. (Philadelphia: 1823, and other editions), vol. 3, no. 7.
71. See Ruth Ann Musick," The Old Album of William A. Larkin," JAF 60 (July-Sept. 1947): 201-51.
72. For example, The American Songster (N ew York: N . C. Nafis, 1839 [CPMS P-085046], and New York: Nafis and Cornish; Nafis, Cornish and Co., and John B. Perry, n.d. [CPM SP-085047]).