Barberie Allen- Clawson (NC) c1931 Scarborough I
[Dorothy Scarborough, A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains, 1937, p. 92. All versions are pre-1936, the year Scarborough died. Bronson dates her ballads, c. 1931. Her notes follow.
No indication was made about the date, I've used Bronson's default date.
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.
* * * *
One is impressed with the suddenness by which disappointed love or remorse could kill in those days, and also by the almost instantaneous haste in burying the deceased. Most of the singers report that the young man of the changing name but unchanging affection, died before Barbara returned home from her call on him. That is credible enough, if one believes that men do die because girls reject them, but what shocks the hearer is the fact that before she was able to walk home from his house, the pall-bearers started out to bury his remains, and overtook her. Of course, she might be a slow walker, and indeed we are told that "slowly, slowly she got up."
Lillian Craig, of Roanoke, Virginia, contributed a "Barbara Allen" that she took down from the singing of Flossie Clawson, in Dark Ridge, North Carolina, or one of her walking trips through the mountains. This is interesting because of the fact that it, too, gives the motive for the girl's seeming extremity of unkindness, the wound of jealousy which can explain a good deal. It also adds details of her defense mechanism of indifference in scorning him. Freud might have been interested in her reactions. Her name, too, is spelled in an original way.
(I) BARBERIE ALLEN Sung by Flossie Clawson, in Dark Ridge, North Carolina.
Sweet, William taken sick and died
For the love of Barberie Allen.
They sent a servant to the town
Where Barberie had a dwelling.
Oh, go, oh, go, at your true love's call
If your name be Barberie Allen.
Slowly, slowly, she got up
And slowly she moved onward.
And all she said when she got there,
Young man, I think you're dying.
I know I'm sick and very sick,
I feel very much like dying.
And none the better will I ever be
Till I get Barberie Allen.
Don't you remember the other day
All in your time of drinking,
You passed a health to the ladies all around
And slighted Barberie Allen?
I remember the other day
All in my time of drinking,
I passed a health to the ladies all around,
With a heart for Barberie Allen.
She skipped, she hopped, all over the floor,
She turned her back upon him,
Saying, None the better will you ever be,
For you'll never get Barberie Allen.
Slowly, slowly, she raised up,
And slowly she moved onward.
She hadn't got but a mile from town
When she heard the death bells ringing.
She looked east, she looked west,
She seen the coffin coming;
Oh, sit him down, pray sit him down,
And let me look upon him.
They sit him down and she looked him
She bursted out to crying.
She cried and cried until she died
For the love of 'William Hillard.
They buried her in the new church yard,
And buried him beside her.
And out of her grave there sprung a red rose,
And out of his'n a brier.
They grew to the top of the new church house,
Scarce could grow any higher;
They linked and tied in a true love's knot,
The red rose clung to the brier.