Hangman- Humphreys (VA) 1932 Davis AA
[Davis: More Traditional Ballads from Virginia, 1960. His notes follow. The last line is from "The Blackest Crow," one of a large group of True Lover's Farewell Songs usually categorized under Dearest Dear. The earliest form is found in the English broadside called 'The Unkind Parents, or, The Languishing Lamentation of two Loyal Lovers'. It was printed for C. Bates, next the Crown-Tavern in West-Smithfield. The Bodleian dates Bates' operation to "between 1685 and 1714."
R. Matteson 2015]
THE MAID FREED FROM THE GALLOWS
(Child, No. 95)
The widespread European popularity of this ballad is emphasized by Child, who devotes most of his five-page headnote to a summary description of versions in the following languages: Sicilian, Spanish, Faroe, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, German, Esthonian, Wendish, Russian, Little-Russian, and Slovenian. The usual story of the ballad, both in northern and southern Europe, is thus summarized by Child: "A young woman has fallen into the hands of corsairs; father, mother, brother, sister, refuse to pay ransom, but her lover, in one case husband, stickles at no price which may be necessary to retrieve her." By comparison with these texts, Child finds the English versions "defective and distorted" and they are so in the sense that they seldom give any explanation for the maid's plight but present only the final conversational drama and its happy resolution, with the resulting release of tension. In any other sense, one would find Child's adjectives unduly harsh, in view of the known tendency of ballads to reduce antecedent action to a minimum and to concentrate on the crucial situation. Such simplification and concentration do not suggest inferiority. On the contrary, whether or not all of our curiosity about the situation is satisfied, the ballad is a superb example of ballad compression, dramatic presentation, objectivity of narrative method, and incremental repetition.
A few English and American texts do offer some explanation of the girl's plight: she has lost or stolen a golden ball, comb, key, or cup. Miss Lucy Broadwood and others following her have suggested that the golden ball represents virginity. See Coffin, pp. 95-99, for detailed references.
Since the time of Child, the ballad has been widely collected in many versions in England and the United States, but not in Scotland or in Canada. TBVa prints twenty-two of thirty-one available texts, and five tunes. More recently, four additional items, with two tunes, have been recovered from Virginia. All four and both tunes have been found worthy of inclusion here.
In a sampling of recent American collections, the ballad is represented as follows: Cox, seven texts and no tune: Barry, four texts and no tune; Sharp-Karpeles, ten texts (or partial texts) and ten tunes; Belden, one text and one tune; Randolph, six texts and four tunes; Brown, thirteen texts and eight tunes ; and so on. Belden (p. 66) lists fourteen American states in which the ballad had been found before 1940, and Brown (II, 143) adds four more states recently heard from. Coffin (p. 96) gives an impressive list of references.
In America the somewhat ponderous Child title is more often "Hangman," "Hangman's Tree," "The Gallows Tree," of some such title. The sex of the victim is sometimes changed from a girl to a man, sometimes left in doubt. The "golden ball" form of the story or other explanation of the girl's predicament is rare. Occasionally, the ballad is acted as a play or used as a game, especially by Negroes, to whom the ballad's simple dramatic form and repetitive stanzaic pattern (the latter so closely akin to their own spirituals) seem to have appealed. In this connection, note Kittredge's use of a version of this ballad (incidentally, a version which was brought over to Virginia before the Revolution) to illustrate the portibility of a qualified form of so-called "communal composition," in his Introduction to the one-volume edition of Child (pp. xxv-xxvii). But let us not revive ancient controversy!
The ballad has been much written about, especially as to its currency among Negroes, who also make use of the story as a combination of ballad stanzas and interpolated narrative or folk tale closely related to the form known as cante-fable. (Several of Child's texts also approach the cante-fable form) Chapter 8 of Reed Smith's South Carolina Ballads traces "Five Hundred Years of 'The Maid Freed from the Gallows' " (pp. 80-94). Miss Dorothy Scarborough writes delightfully and informatively of her encounters with this ballad in On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (pp. 35-43). versions of the cante-fable form current among the Negroes of Jamaica and the Bahamas are given in Walter Jekyll's Jamaican Song and Story (pp. 35 tr.), by Elsie Clews Parsons in "Folk-Tales of Andros Island, Bahamas," Memoirs of the American Folk Lore Society, XIII (1918), 152-54, and by Miss Martha M. Beckwith in "The English Ballad in Jamaica," PMLA, XXXI), (June, 1924), 475-76. Miss Beckwith's cante-fable text from Jamaica is reprinted in The Ballad Book (1955) of MacEdward Leach as his version C (pp. 298-99), and also in The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English, Speaking World (1956) of Albert B. Friedman as his version C (pp. 134-36).
The four items here presented-three new texts and two new tunes-add something to the very full record of this ballad in TBVa. AA follows the usual pattern of the ballad in America in addressing the "hangman" rather than the "judge" usually found in British texts. It has an unusual final stanza, appropriate enough but obviously imported from a later song. BB is a recently recovered tune for a text which was printed in TBVa without tune. The full text (not here reproduced) reveals that the prisoner is a man. CC is an interesting fragment in which the compressed third stanza of the cycle of three is not spoken directly by the relative but is indirectly reported by the prisoner, who is apparently the speaker throughout the ballad.
DD adds a new type of version to the Virginia collection. It is called "Highway Man," and represents a crossing of the old ballad with a more recent badman ballad or convict song generally known as "Poor Boy," "Gambling Man," or "The Roving Gambler." The "maid" has become a highwayman who is saved from hanging by his girl. The first two stanzas and refrain of first-person emotive depression are imported from the more recent song' but with the third stanza the pattern of the old ballad takes charge, to continue through stanza 11. The final stanza with its "I love that highway man" reverts to the newer song. It is an interesting but not a unique patchwork version. Coffin cites three examples as his Story Type F, from Mississippi (Hudson), North Carolina (Henry), and Kentucky (Fuson). Henry (pp. 94-95) prints a long letter from Phillips Barry commenting on the ballad and rightly urging its printing as an actual version of the old ballad, not as an appendix. Since that time Alton Morris has presented a fragmentary text in Folksongs of Florida (1950), pp. 298-99, and the Brown Collection (1952) prints a seven-stanza text from North Carolina (pp. 148-49). The latter text is reprinted in Friedman's recent (1956) "Anthology, pp. 136-32. The present Virginia text of twelve stanzas plus refrain is the fullest text of this version so far recovered, and includes interesting verbal variations. Other versions include only the coming of the girl in addition to the emotive stanzas. In the Virginia text, mother, father, and girl appear, making nine stanzas from the old ballad as against four from the newer one. It will be noted that the prisoner's appeal is to "Mr. Judge" (the usual English form), not to the hangman.
To be added to the references of Coffin and others is an eight-stanza Louisiana text of "The Highway Man," published in Saxon-Dreyer-Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), p. 444. There is no tune. The book is a collection o{ Louisiana folk tales and other folklore brought together by the Louisiana Writers Project.
Barry's letter to Henry draws attention to the fact that "The Maid Freed from the Gallows" is also found in combination with two versions of "Mary Hamilton" printed by Child, "in which the heroine is not hanged in Edinburgh town, but is ransomed by her lover" (Henry, p. 94). This may be a more respectable liaison than that with the highwayman, but it represents the operation of the same process in oral tradition.
The two tunes here given seem relatively undistinguished but add something to the musical record of the ballad in America.
AA. "Hangman." Collected by John Stone, of Paint Bank, Va. Sung by Mrs. J. H. Humphreys, of Paint Bank, Va. Craig County. September 22, 1932. The final stanza is not usual with this ballad, and is an obvious importation from any one of a number of later love songs such as "The True Lover's Farewell." (See Sharp-KarpeJes, II, 114.) Tune noted by Mr. Stone.
1 "Hangman, hangman, slack your rope,
Please slack it for a while,
Slack it till my mother comes,
She's riding many a long mile.
2 "Mother, O Mother, did you bring me gold,
Likewise to pay my fine,
Or did you come for to see me hanged
Way down on the gallows line?"
3 "O no, O no, I brought you no gold,
Likewise to pay your fine,
But I also come for see you hanged
Way down on the gallows line."
4 "Hangman, hangman, slack your rope,
Please slack it for a while,
Slack it till my father comes,
He's riding many a long mile.
5 "Father, O Father, did you bring me gold,
Likewise to pay my fine,
Or did you come for to see me hanged
Way down on the gallows line?"
6 "No, O no, I brought you no gold,
Likewise to pay your fine,
But I also come for see you hanged
Wry down on the gallows line."
7 "Hangman, hangman, slack your rope,
Please slack it for a while,
Slack it till my brother comes,
He's riding many a long mile.
8 "Brother, O Brother, did you bring me gold,
Likewise to pay my fine,
Or did you come for to see me hanged
Way down on the gallows line?"
9 "No, O no, I brought you no gold,
Likewise to pay your fine,
But I also come for see you hanged
Way down on the gallows line."
10 "Hangman, hangman, slack your rope,
Please slack it for a while,
Slack it till my sister comes,
She's riding many a long mile.
11 "Sister, O Sister, did you bring me gold,
Likewise to pay my fine,
Or did you come for to see me hanged
Way down on the gallows line?"
12 "No, O no, I brought you no gold,
Likewise to pay your fine,
But I also come for see you hanged
Way down on the gallows line."
13 "Hangman, hangman, slack your rope,
Please slack it for a while,
Slack it till my true love comes,
He's riding many a long mile.
14 "True love, true love, did you bring me gold,
Likewise to pay my fine,
Or did you come for to see me hanged
Way down on the gallows line?"
15 "Yes, O yes, I brought you gold,
Likewise to pay your fine,
But I did not come to see you hanged
Way down on the gallows line."
16 "The blackest crow that ever flew
Will surely turn white
If ever I prove false to thee,
Bright day shall turn to night."