Beautiful Bride- Bess (MO) c1864 Belden B
[My date- Civil War period. My title replacing "Song Ballad." Belden: Ballads and Songs- 1940. His extensive notes follow
R. Matteson 2015]
The Wife of Usher's Well
(child 79)
This ballad has persisted better in America than in the old country. Child's C is from Shropshire, 'taken down 24th March, 1883, from the recitation of an elderly fisherman at Bridgworth;' I have found no later record of it in the British Isles. Nor has it been reported from Canada or Newfoundland. In the United States many texts have been taken down in recent years, nearly all of them from the South. In Maine Barry found one person who recognized nearly all of Cox's West Virginia text A and another who knew several stanzas of Cox's B and D; it has not otherwise been recorded from New England. Texts have been printed from Virginia (TBV 278-88, SharpK I 157-9, SCSM 168-9), 'West Virginia (FSS 88-93), Kentucky (JAFL XXX 808, FSKM 4, BKH 59-60, SharpK I 155-7), Tennessee (ETWVMB 121-2, SharpK I 152-3, 160, FSSH 71-2), North Carolina (Child V 294-5, JAFL XXX 306-7 (by way of California), SharpK I 150-2, 153-4, 159-60), Georgia (JAFL XLIV 69-4, FSSH 70-1), Mississippi (FSM 93-5), Nebraska (ABS 20-1), the Ozarks (OASPS 180-1), and Missouri.
All of these American texts seem to belong to one version, distinguished from Child A B C by the following particulars:
1. The revenants are children (most often 'babes') not the 'stalwart sons' of Child A.
2. There is no cursing of the waters; but the mother often prays for the return of her babes.
3. The children decline earthly food and drink because 'yonder stands our Savior dear, to him we must resign.' And commonly, too, the splendor of the golden spread. the mother lays upon their bed is rebuked as evidence of worldly pride.
4. The children are sent away at the beginning to 'learn their grammaree', a feature not found in Child A B C.
5. The recall of ghosts by cock-crow is either changed to the crowing of 'chickens' (except in BBM B, which is Irish)-- this looks like a case of American bowdlerizing-- or is omitted altogether, the children refusing the fine bed their mother has prepared for them or simply making one another at the proper time.
6. Use of the folk-belief that tears shed for the dead disturb their rest in the grave by wetting their winding-sheet. This is a not unfailing but a very common feature of the American texts and does not appear in Child A, B, C.
The Shropshire version has in common with these American texts a strongly religious coloring, but has little resemblance to them in detail. One suspects some printed source as the explanation of the likeness in the American texts, but I find no mention of such.
I have in my file (it was printed in JAFI, XXX 308-9) a text from Tennessee and also one printed in the Grapurchat, school paper of the East Radford (Va.) State Teachers College and sent to me by Professor Jean Taylor. The former was communicated to me by Professor A. R. Hohlfeld of the University of Wisconsin, who had it from Miss Mary Pierce of Nashville, In answer to a query of mine as to the provenience of the text Miss Pierce wrote to me: I remember that the woman who gave me "The Wife of Usher's Well" said that it was from a (ballad) book.' Neither of these texts is from Missouri and they are
therefore not given here.
B. [Beautiful Bride] 'Song Ballad.' From the Civil War diary of Jacob Bess of Bollinger County, lent to me by his grandson, Professor Charles Bess of Flat River Junior College. There are two copies of it in the diary, of which this is the second and fuller one. It belongs to the same tradition as A, but varies from it interestingly. The spelling and pointing have been standardized, but not the idiom.
There was a bride, a beautiful bride,
And three little babes had she.
She sent them away to the northern land
To learn the garmurre.[1]
They hadn't been gone so very long,
About three week and a day,
When sickness spread wide o'er the land
And swept them all away.
She prayed to God, if there be any God,
If there be any God on high,
To send her three little babes back home
That night or soon next day.
It being close to Christmas times,
When the nights was long and cool,
'Come home, come home, my three little
Come running home again.
'Spread o'er the table bread and wine,
That my three little babes may dine.'
'I can not eat none of your bread,
Neither can I drink your wine.'
'Tomorrow morn at eight o'clock
With my Savior I will dine.'
'Spread o'er the bed the golden sheet,
That my three little babes may sleep.'
'Take it off, take it off once more and again,
Take it off once more and again;
It hain't been long since pride began,
Here stands my Savior word.'[2]
'Cold clods, cold clods at my head and feet,
Cold, clods at my head and feet;
babes, The tears that flowed from a mother's eyes
Will wet a winding sheet.'
1. So written in the diary. Possibly to be read as 'grammar,' but more probably, in view of the rime, as 'grammarie.'
2. So it stands in the diary; and I do not know how construe or amend it. [Compare this to Davis A, where "pride" stands for "the pride of life."]