Butcher Boy- E.L. Simons (IN) 1951
[From Folk Songs in One Family: The E.L. Simons Folk Song Collection; from cassette tape recorded by E.L. Simons in November 1951. His notes follow.
R. Matteson 2017]
Note from E.L. Simons (1952): Both my grandfather and grandmother Simons are acquainted with this version, and I suspect that it was learned from my great-grandmother Raburn. She was from Indiana and this text [is] fairly close to those listed in Brewster, Ballads and Songs of Indiana (1940), pp. 198-201.
This song has often had other settings such as London city or New York. Brewster considers his versions garbled and he is seconded by Creighton, who says, in Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1933), pp. 33-34, that the song is compounded from several British broadsides including "The Cruel Father," "Sheffield Park," and "There is an Alehouse in Yonder Town." The song also has obvious affinities with the popular song "There is a Tavern in the Town."
The Butcher Boy
In Jersey City where I did dwell
Lived a butcher boy I loved so well;
He courted me, my heart away
And then with me he would not stay.
There is an inn in that same town,
Where my love goes and sits him down;
He takes a strange girl on his knee,
And tells her things that he won't tell me
It's grief for me, I'll tell you why,
Because she has more gold than I,
But her gold will melt and her silver fly,
And someday she'll be as poor as I.
She went upstairs to make her bed,
And nothing to her mother said,
Her mother she went up to see,
Saying, "Where, oh, where can my daughter be."
Her father he at length came home
Saying, "Where, oh, where has my daughter gone."
He went upstairs, the door he broke,
And found her hanging by a rope.
He took a knife and cut her down,
And on her breast these words he found,
"Oh, what a silly young girl am I,
To hang myself for the Butcher Boy."
Go dig my grave both wide and deep,
Place a marble stone at my head and feet,
And on my breast a turtle dove,
To show this world that I died for love.