Butcher's Boy- Ora Johnson (VA) c.1931 Scarborough B
[From Dorothy Scarborough; A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains, 1938. Date for versions collected was established by Bronson as c.1931. Her notes follow,
R. Matteson 2017]
Perhaps one might think that convention would scorn a butcher boy as a hero of romance and tragedy, but the girl in love evidently entertains no contempt for his lowly position. She loves him madly, enough to hang herself because he prefers another who has more gold than she has. The shift from the first person to that of the impersonal narrator, then back again, is interesting. The brief dialogue that the girl has with her mother is realistic, and the emotions that the father feels when he goes upstairs to see his girl and finds her dead body hanging there, can readily be imagined. Fragments of other love songs are found in these variants, as here the stanza of direction for digging a spacious grave and placing the marbles and the
dove in appropriate position.
Ora Johnson, of Russell Fork, Council, Virginia, gave me her ballet of the song, which I copy with no emendations[1].
(B) Butcher's Boy
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 not stay.
There is a strange home in this town
Where he goes up and sits right down.
He takes another girl on his knee
he tells her things he wouldn't tell me.
I have to grieve, I tell you why,
Because she has more gold than I.
her gold will melt and silver fly,
In time of need she will be as poor as I.
I went upstairs to go to bed,
And nothing to my Mother said.
But Mother said, you are acting queer.
What the trouble, my daughter dear?
Oh, Mother dear, you need not know
The fate and sorrow, grief and woe
But give me a chair and set me down
with pen and ink to write far town.
Oh, dig my grave both wide and deep,
Place a marble stone at my head and feet,
and upon my breast a snow-white dove
to show to the world that I died for love.
And when her father first come home,
Where is my daughter? Where has she gone?
He went upstairs and the door he broke
and found her hanging to a rope"
He took his knife and cut her down,
And in her bosom these words he found,
A silly girl am I you know
to hang myself for the butcher boy.
But there he found while we go free,
But thought of a boy who don't love me.
That's the last it will ever be
till orange grow on apple trees.
The final stanza should be interpreted as "Must I be bound and he go free?" That oft-repeated plaint of hopeless love is as poignant here as if it concerned a prince instead of a butcher boy.
1. minor corrections made