Butcher Boy - William Webster (RI) 1952 Flanders
[From D37805, a digitized archival cassette in the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection at Middlebury College Special Collections & Archives. https://archive.org/details/HHFBC_tapes_T05A
R. Matteson 2017]
Butcher Boy - voice performance by William Webster at Wakefield (Rhode Island). Classification #: LAP24. Dated 11-13-1952.
In Jersey City where I dwelled,
A butcher boy I loved so well,
He courted me my heart away
And then with me, he would not stay.
There is a house right in this town,
Where my love goes she sits him down,
He takes a strange girl on his knee,
And tells to her what he once tells to me.
Oh grief, oh grief I will tell you why,
Because she has more gold than I
Her gold will melt and silver fly,
She'll see the day she'll be as poor as I.
There is a bird, right in this tree,
Some say she's blind and she cannot see she
I wish to the Lord it's the same with me,
Before I fell into his company.
She calls for a chair to sit her down,
A pen and ink to write it down,
And on each line she shed's a tear,
A calling back, her Willie dear.
When her father, came home at noon[1],
Inquired for his daughter soon,
He went upstairs and he burst the door
And he found her hanging to the floor.
He took his knife and he took her down
And in her bosom these words he found:
You'll dig my grave both wide and deep,
Lay a marble stone at my head and feet,
And on my bosom a turtle dove,
To show to the world that I died of love.
I wish I wish but I wish in vain,
I wish she were alive again,
But alive again she ne'er will be,
Till an orange grows on an apple tree.
1. William Webster's version ends abruptly here. The rest is supplied from Amos Eaton.