Barbara Allen- Douglass(NC) c1936 Scarborough D
[Dorothy Scarborough, A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains, 1937. All version are pre-1936, the year Scarborough died. Bronson dates her ballads, c. 1931. Her notes follow.
It's likely that this is taken (although some of the ballad is left off) from a reprint of Percy's English version, Child Bd. It certainly is not from oral tradition.
R. Matteson 2015]
BONNY BARBARA ALLEN
(Child No. 84)
Of all the ballads brought over from Britain and handed down by oral transmission in America, none is more popular than "Barbara Allen." Pepys has recorded his delight in hearing Mrs. Knipp, an actress, sing it in 1666. "In perfect pleasure I was to hear her sing, and especially her little Scotch song of Barbary Allen." Goldsmith wrote that he was moved by it- "The music of the finest singers is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairy-maid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good-night, or The cruelty of Barbara Allen!" It is preserved in Percy's Reliques and in many another collection, and Arthur Kyle Davis reports ninety-two items of it from Virginia, some of them fragmentary and repetitious, with a dozen melodies, none of them identical with others, though similar to them.
In general, the tune is found in many variants, the details are different, but the tragedy of love and death remains the same in its essentials and (when the right singer sings it) has power to touch the heart now as three centuries ago. The name of the luckless lover varies, but that of Barbara Allen remains constant, save for spelling. Albert J. Beveridge says that this was one of the songs sung by Abraham Lincoln as a boy in Indiana.
* * * *
North Carolina was responsible for several specimens of the ballad, which is generally current in the South. The notebook loaned me by Miss Clementine Douglass, which contained the songs written down for her by her weaving girls, has a brief recital of the tale.
(D) BARBARA ALLEN. From the notebook loaned by Miss Clementine Douglass
In Scarlet Town where I was born
There was a fair maid dwelling,
Made every youth cry "well-a-day",
Her name was Barbara Allen.
All in the merry month of May
When the green buds were swelling,
Young Jemmy Grove on his death bed lay
For love of Barbara Allen.
And death is printed on her face
And o'er her heart is stealing,
Then haste away to comfort him,
O lovely Barbara Allen.
So slowly slowly she came up,
And slowly she came nigh him,
And all she said when there she came,
"Young man, I think you're dying."
When he was dead and laid in his grave
Her heart was struck with sorrow.
'Oh, Mother, Mother, make my bed,
For I shall die tomorrow."
Farewell, she said, ye virgins all,
And shun the fault I fell in.
Henceforth take warning by the fall
Of cruel Barbara Allen.