Butcher Boy- Effie Tucker (TN) 1953 Boswell
[From Folk Songs of Middle Tennessee, George Boswell Collection. Notes by Charles Wolfe follow.
R. Matteson 2017]
In the 1930, Edwin Kirkland found two versions of this stark ballad in the Knoxville area, and most of the East Tennessee collections include at least one reading of it: Crabtree (728), Duncan (138), Haun (118), Perry (218). The Archive of American Folksong files contain recordings from Gatlinburg (Mrs. A. J. Huff) and Maryville Cades Cove (Edith Harmon). Boswell collected no fewer than twelve versions. In sum, the ballad seems to be one of the more popular found in the state and one that seems to be as popular ih the middle region as in the eastern highlands.
The basic plot of the song-a girl who takes her own life after being spurned by her lover-appears in English ballads dating as far back as the 1600s. The Harvard Shakespearean scholar G. L. Kittredge made a long study of its history, concluding that this particular song was derived from two older English ballads, "The Squire's Daughter" and "There Is an Alehouse in Yonder
Town" (the latter is a forerunner of the familiar "There Is a Tavern in the Town"). The ballad shows up in a number of early songsters (little pocket-sized books of songs without musical scores) and broadsides and has been collected by folklorists in both North and South in the United States. Indeed, many of the early versions of the song start "ln Jersey City whpre I did dwell," an understandable change for a song being imported and adapted. However, most of the Tennessee versions (as well as the Virginia ones) retain the "London town" opening as given here. Laws provides a wide range of references (American Balladry, P24. A more detailed account, as well as a number of texts collected in the early years of the twentieth century, is found in Belden (201-7. Not mentioned in either source are two extremely popular commercial Victrola records: one by Virginia singer Kelly Harrell (Victor, 1925) and one by the Blue Sky Boys (Victor/Bluebird, 1940). Harrell's version, a bestseller of sorts, was especially potent; radio logs and singers' prompt books show that the song was a favorite with early country singers in the 1930s.
Boswell collected lengthy versions of this song from Myrtle Carrigan, Charlie Hatcher, Lily Bell Whipple, and Mrs. W. M. Jones, in addition to the one presented here. This rendition was obtained from Leona DuBois Lipscomb at Clarksville on November 21,1953. Lipscomb had it from her grandmother, Effie Villines Tucker (Mrs. George Tucker), a native and longtime resident of Cross Plains, in northeastern Robertson County.
Butcher Boy
1. In London city where I did dwell,
A butcher boy I loved so well,
He courted me my life away,
And then with me he would nor stay.
2. There is a strange house in this town,
Where he goes up and sits right down,
He takes another girl on his knee,
He tells her things he won't tell me.
3. I have to grieve, I'll tell you why,
Because she has more gold than I,
Her gold will melt and silver fly,
In time of need she'll be as poor as I.
4. I went upstairs to go to bed,
And nothing to my mother said,
But mother said, "You're acting queer,
What is the trouble my daughter dear?"
5. "Oh mother dear, you need not know,
The pain and sorrow, grief and woe,
Give me a chair and sit me down,
With pen and ink to write words down.
6. "Oh dig my grave both wide and deep,
Place a marble stone at my head and feet,
Upon my breast a snow-white dove,
To show the world I died for love."
7. And when her father first came home,
"'Where's my daughter, where has she gone?"
He went upstairs and the door he broke,
And found her hanging to a rope.
8. He took his knife and cur her down,
And in her bosom these words he found,
"A silly girl am I you know,
To hang myself for a butcher's boy.