Barbara Allen- Funderburk/Trull (NC) 1916 Brown Q
[Partial text. From the Brown Collection; Volume 2, 1952; with music in Part 4 added to Part 2. There are also several additional texts in Part 4. The Brown editors' notes follow.
R. Matteson 2015]
27. Bonny Barbara Allan (Child 84)
Of all the ballads in the Child collection this is easily the most widely known and sung, both in the old country and in America. Scarcely a single regional gathering of ballads but has it, and it has been published in unnumbered popular songbooks. See BSM 60-1. Mrs. Eckstorm in a letter written in 1940 informed me that she and 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. The numerous texts in the North Carolina collection may conveniently be grouped according to the setting in three divisions: (1) those that begin in the first person of Barbara's lover (or at least of the narrator), (2) those that begin with a springtime setting, and (3) those that begin with an autumnal setting. Of course those in group 1 may also have either the springtime or the autumnal setting. The rose-and-brier ending is likely to be attached to any of the texts. The lover's bequests to Barbara, a feature not infrequent in modern British versions but unusual in America, appears once in the North Carolina texts, in F. The first person of the lover commonly is dropped after the opening stanza, but in F it holds through four stanzas. Not all of the texts are given in full.
Q. 'Barbara Allen.' Identical copies contributed to the Monroe (Union county) Journal in November 1916 by Miss Beulah M. Funderburk and Mrs. H. C Trull. Agrees rather closely with P so far as that text goes, but adds some stanzas. In the deathbed scene (where he describes himself as "very, very sick" instead of "very bad off") she charges him with slighting her:
'Do you remember the other night
In the ball room dancing,
You danced and flirted with the ladies around
And slighted Barbara Allen.'
'Yes, I remember in yonder town
In the ball room dancing,
1 danced and flirted with the ladies around;
But I still loved Barbara Allen.'
And when she meets the funeral procession, instead of merely covering her face and rushing oflf to her mother she makes a speech:
The more she looked the more she wept,
Till she bursted into crying,
Saying, "I might have saved that young man's life
If I had done my duty.'