Barbara Allen- Stovall (NC) 1940 Brown CC
[Partial text given, see text of Child A. From the Brown Collection; Volume 2, 1952. Some texts have music from Vol. 4 added. There are also several additional texts in Vol. 4. The Brown editors' notes follow.
It seems impossible to have Child A sung verbatim, even minus one stanza. Clearly this is from print. However the additional stanza is traditional.
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.
CC. 'Barbara Allen.' Secured by Kendrick Few of Durham in June 1940 from Sidney Stovall of Buies Creek, Harnett county. This again is Child's A text verbatim et literatim except that it omits stanza 6. At the end of the manuscript is this note: "There is another version that goes like this, but has two extra verses. One of them I have forgot, but it's something about being buried in the graveyard by a grey stone church. The last verse goes like this:
Out of his grew a lily white rose
And out of hers a briar,
And there they twined a true love knot.
The rose around the briar."
These last two texts (BB and CC) are probably explained by what Professor White tells me of Dr. Brown's method of stimulating research for ballads. He would mimeograph texts of ballads and distribute them to students and others, asking if they knew these songs. Frequently they did, and returned the sheet with the information that they knew the song. Thus this returned sheet would get into the files as evidence that such and such a person could furnish a version of such and such a song; but for some reason the version was not secured.