Georgie- Mary Bird McAllister (VA) 1959 Clayton and Foss; Bronson 54
[From LC/AAFS recording No. 11,808 (A11) by Paul Clayton and George Foss. There are two transcriptions, mine and the one by Foss in 1993. Also there's a transcription by Bronson (No. 54) which is inferior and won't be included.
Bronson 47 is Georgie (Geordie) sung by Mrs. Lucy McAllister, Mary Bird's sister, of Harriston, VA, collected in 1935 by Wilkinson. Here the first verse which is identical:
Saddle up saddle up my milk white steed,
And bring him to my bonny,
It's I may ride to the new cast town,
To plead for the life of Georgie.
Following is an article on Mary Bird McAllister, at the bottom of the page is an article on Clayton.
R. Matteson 2013, 2016]
Voice from past sang of a social time in history
Sunday, September 19, 2010.
by David Maurer The Daily Progress
It’s often the most undeserving people who are remembered by history.
Positive contributors to life’s story, such as Mary Bird McAllister, frequently become little more than a faded name on the ancestral-tree page of an old family Bible. And yet this particular mountain woman, who lived much of her life in Brown’s Cove, gave the world a gift money couldn’t buy.
Deep within the recesses of the Library of Congress, embedded on magnetic tape, is the singing voice of Mrs. McAllister. She can be heard singing more than 50 folk ballads, many of which originated in the Scottish highlands centuries ago and were brought here by the first Virginia settlers.
In the late 1950s, folksinger Paul Worthington, who recorded under the name Paul Clayton, had recorded her voice for posterity singing the ancient ballads. Having traveled throughout Europe collecting traditional ballads and folksongs, he realized the importance of retaining the old songs Mrs. McAllister knew.
At the time of the recordings the mother of eight had lived a long life. She was born in Brown’s Cove on April 8, 1877, the daughter of Larkin Bruce.
When she was 10, she started plucking the strings on her brother Grant’s banjo. She liked it so much that she decided to make one of her own.
The ingenious little girl got hold of a wooden hoop and then secured a thick piece of cardboard to it to create the banjo’s head. A brother carved a neck and tuning pegs for it out of wood and fastened it to the body.
In an interview Mrs. McAllister gave The Daily Progress in the summer of 1957, she said she waxed strands of cotton and used them for strings. After tuning up, she was ready to go.
During the interview, the self-taught banjo player said she could play her homemade instrument as well as her brother’s “store-boughten” one.
As the front-porch chat with the reporter went on, she remembered a time when apple butter “stewings” or “corn shuckings” were community events. After the fires went out beneath the big kettles, or the last yellow ears of corn had been shucked, the musical instruments would come out.
Then, late into the night, square dancers would swirl to the music of banjos, fiddles and guitars. It was at these social get-togethers that Mrs. McAllister learned the words and music to the old songs.
The wife of Lem McAllister probably didn’t see herself as a repository of historically important material. She was simply a woman who had once enjoyed a chew of tobacco and an occasional nip of locally brewed moonshine.
She had acquired the tobacco habit by way of her father. As a youngster she would accompany him into the mountains to pick huckleberries.
When she got thirsty, he would give her a small piece of chewing tobacco to wet up her mouth. It wasn’t long before she started “borrowing” a chew from dad or a brother just to enjoy the tasting and spitting for its own sake.
Mrs. McAllister said the “chewing and nipping” ended when she joined the Pentecostal Church. She never did give up the music.
A few months after her 80th birthday, she and Worthington supplied the music during a “finger dinner” at the historic Headquarters house in Brown’s Cove. One onlooker remarked how nimble her fingers still were as she played and sang.
Of course, the inevitable day came when word moved from ridge to hollow that the balladeer with the low and lovely voice was gone. Sadly, life teaches that the tracks left by the hard stomp of a tyrant’s boots are not as easily eroded by time as the gently placed footsteps of a Mary Bird McAllister.
But with the help of a young folksinger, this woman of the mountains held back the darkness cast by a forgetful world and preserved a ray of history.
Georgie- Sung by Mary Bird McAllister of Brown's Cove, VA. October 31, 1959. Collected by Clayton and Foss; transcribed Matteson. Listen: http://www.klein-shiflett.com/shifletfamily/HHI/GeorgeFoss/SONGS/song6.html
Saddle up saddle up my milk white steed,
And bring him to my bonny,
It's I may ride to the new cast town, [1]
For to plead for the life of Georgie.
In come this young lady ridin' amongst 'em all
Looked both sad and sorrow.
I'm a-feared young lady you have came too late
For Georgie is condemned already.
"If I was a-standin' on yonders hill
Where kisses I've had many;
Bright swords and pistols by my side,
I would fight for the life of Georgie."
"Speak for yourself George, speak for yourself,
Oh ain't you the fates of many?
Oh speak for yourself George, speak for yourself
Oh ain't you the fates of many?"
"I'm sure that I never killed no one
Although I have robbed many.
I stole sixteen of the King's best teams,
And sold them in Beau Valley."
George he was hung with a golden chain
The chain did ring for many,
Oh George he came from a noble race
And his mother was a honorable lady.
Footnote: 1. This is usually sung, castle (new castle town)
[Transcription George Foss 1993]
Saddle up saddle up my milk-white steed
And bring to me my Barney.
It's I may ride to the New Caste town
For to plead for the life of Georgie.
In come this young lady ridin' amongst 'em all
Looked both sad and sorrow.
I'm afeared young lady you have came too late
For Georgie is condemned already.
"If I was a' standin' on yonders hill
Where kisses I've had many
Bright swords and pistols by my side
I would fight for the life of Georgie."
"Speak for yourself George, speak for yourself
Oh ain't you the face of many?
Oh Speak for yourself George, speak for yourself
Oh ain't you the face of many?"
"I'm sure 'at I never killed no one
Although I have robbed many.
I stole sixteen of the King's best team
And sold them in Beau Valley."
George he was hung with a golden chain
The chain did ring for many,
Oh George he came from a noble race
And his mother was a hon'able lady.
Notes: This version of "Georgie" as sung by Mrs. McAllister is typical of the oldest ballads still sung in the Southern Appalachians. The story is condensed and straightforward; the tune is simple and robust. Mrs. McAllister often paused in singing Georgie to explain that "'Ain't you the face of many?' meant 'Haven't you killed many people?'" The longer ballad story is here condensed so that it seems to fly past, slowing down only briefly for the lyric stanza of exquisite folk poety:
"If I was a standin' on yonders hill
Where kisses I've had many
Bright swords and pistols by my side
I would fight for the life of Georgie."
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The Song Collector
How folksinger Paul Clayton brought the music of Virginia to the world
by Catherine Moore
Paul Clayton and the Folksong Revival by Bob Coltman is the first biography of the folksinger and song collector. Accounts from friends, family and fellow musicians relate Clayton’s life, from his musical childhood to his teenage years as a radio singer to becoming a New York recording artist to his suicide.Folk music traveled in the back seat of Paul Clayton’s beat-up car in the form of a tape recorder he used to capture the beautiful and obscure mountain ballads of central Virginia. He brought them to Greenwich Village folkies, who were always on the lookout for new songs for their repertoire. Over a decade and a half, Clayton made countless trips between Charlottesville and New York, sharing his enthusiasm and melodies with musicians on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
Followers of American folk music will probably be familiar with the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, the 1960s-era musical mecca where young folkies like Bob Dylan launched their careers by passing the basket during late-night open mics. But U.Va. alumni may be more familiar with the other Gaslight Restaurant, the nexus of Charlottesville’s own folk milieu. Wandering down West Main on an evening in the early ’60s, they may have heard the twinkling of dulcimer strings coming from an open door. If they stepped inside on a special night, they might have seen Paul Clayton (Col ’53, Grad ’57) take the stage with Dylan, Mike Seeger and Bill Clifton to play some of the oldest and rarest folksongs to be found in Virginia.
Born in 1931 in New Bedford, Mass., to a family who sang old whaling songs, Clayton is legendary among hardcore folkies and historians of Charlottesville’s rich music scene. But he never gained wide recognition during his lifetime or since his death in 1967. As biographer Bob Coltman suggests, despite his recording almost 20 full-length albums and his considerable influence on Dylan and others, Clayton remains a folksinger’s folksinger, admired and respected more for his deep knowledge of Virginia folksongs and tireless song-collecting efforts than for his own material.
Clayton arrived at the University of Virginia in 1949 and studied with Arthur Kyle Davis Jr., a scholar of folksongs and author of 1929’s Traditional Ballads of Virginia. Later, as a graduate student, Clayton helped produce More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, writing deeply researched headnotes and transcribing tapes buried in the archives of the Virginia Folklore Society.
Outside the classroom, Clayton rambled across the countryside hunting songs. His travels took him across the U.S. and to parts of Europe and Africa, but his home base was always a remote, primitive log cabin in the area of western Albemarle County known as Brown’s Cove. The cabin became both an artistic retreat for Clayton and the site of some wild parties, according to Coltman, but it also served as the launching point for his song collecting. He was responsible for “discovering” a number of singers and pickers in the area, including Mary Bird McAllister, whom Clayton recorded singing songs like “Across the Blue Mountain to the Allegheny” in the late ’50s.
Dylan visited Clayton’s cabin and spent his 21st birthday at a party thrown by Clayton in the Charlottesville apartment of Steve Wilson, one of Clayton’s closest friends. Dylan had met Clayton in 1961 when both were making nightly rounds of the Greenwich Village folk clubs. But Dylan was familiar with Clayton before they met; a version of the song that comes closest to Clayton’s “big hit”—“Gotta Travel On”—can be found on the earliest recording Dylan made, 1960’s “St. Paul Tape.”
In 1964, Dylan told an interviewer that a folk song “goes deeper than just myself singing it, … it goes into all kinds of weird things, things that I don’t know about, can’t pretend to know about. The only guy I know that can really do it is a guy I know named Paul Clayton, he’s the only guy I’ve ever heard or seen who can sing songs like this, because he’s a medium, he’s not trying to personalize it, he’s bringing it to you … Paul, he’s a trance.”
Dylan, notorious for reaching into other people’s song bags for material of his own, created a controversy when he recorded “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” whose lyrics were partially but quite obviously lifted from Clayton’s song “Who’ll Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone).” Lawyers for the two men became embroiled in a legal rift over rights to the song, but Clayton’s affection for Dylan ensured that the two remained friends throughout.
Though he held the copyright to the song, Clayton couldn’t ultimately claim clear ownership of the work, because its origins appear to have been in the public domain. “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens” was a song Clayton claimed he learned from Mary Bird McAllister. He modified the lyrics and kept the melody. Then along came Dylan and did the same thing—classic folk composition in action. Clayton settled for a small sum, but the incident emphasizes the folk song as an embattled form straddling collective composition and individual authorship. Clayton’s catchphrase has been quoted by more than one participant in the Greenwich Village scene: “If you can’t perform, write; if you can’t write, rewrite; if you can’t rewrite, copyright; if you can’t copyright, sue.”