How Comes That Blood?- (NC) 1941 Collins- Brown A
[My title, replacing Collins generic title. From Brown Collection of NC Folklore, 1952; one of four versions from Vol. 2 and Vol. 4. Brown editors' notes follow. Collins does not provide any information about his version.
R. Matteson 2012, 2014]
7. Edward (Child 13)
Although 'Edward' in the version from which it is named stands at or near the head of English balladry in beauty and power, it is neither very old — Percy's print of 1765 is the earliest record of it — nor very frequent in tradition — Child knew but two versions and a fragment — nor, apart from the Percy and Motherwell versions, a very notable ballad. Percy had his version. Child's B, from Sir David Dalrymple; and the skill and dramatic power of its structure, especially its revelation of the whole meaning of the story in the final stanza, has occasioned doubt of its being really a "popular," i.e., a folk ballad, at least in this version.* The only record of it in modern England is in the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society iii (1938) 205-6, where Miss A. G.
[* Professor Archer Taylor, Edward mid Sven i Rosengaard (University of Chicago Press, 1931), has analyzed all the versions — English, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and American — and concludes that the Percy-Dalrymple form is not the original form, though he thinks that the ballad originated in Britain and traveled to Scandinavia. Later, Professor Bertrand H. Bronson (SFLQ iv [1940] 1-13 and 159-61 ) argues with considerable force that the Percy version is a form of conscious art, especially in its climax, where it is revealed that the murder was devised by the mother. To these it might be added that in no other version is it the father that has been killed; commonly it is a brother, and frequently on no other provocation than his having cut down a bush. The Scandinavian texts are numerous but generally late; Olrik mentions a "comic" text in a manuscript of the 1640's and a parody of it printed as a broadside in 1794, but the other Scandinavian texts were taken down in the nineteenth century.]
Gilchrist gives a seven-stanza text as sung in a Cheshire "Soul-Caking," that is, the Cheshire form of the St. George mumming. In this country it has been found in Virginia (TBV 120-9, SharpK I 50-2, SCSM 183-4), Tennessee (SharpK i 47-8), North Carolina (SharpK 1 46-7, 49, 53), South Carolina (SCSM 181-2), Florida (FSF 248-50), Mississippi (FSM 70-2), Texas (in a release of the University of Texas News Service dated March 24 [1941?]), the Ozarks (OMF 207-8, OFS i 124-6), Ohio (BSD 23-4), and California (CFLQ V 310-11 ). Most of the texts, both from the English-speaking and from the Scandinavian countries, end with a series of bequests, a feature which this ballad shares with 'Lord Randal,' 'The Two Brothers,' and 'Lizzie Wan.' Many texts, the Scandinavian especially, have various ways of saying "never" when the son is asked when he will return from exile — or death.
A. [How Comes That Blood?] 'Edward.' Contributed by Professor Fletcher Collins, Jr., of Elon College, Alamance county, in 1941 and printed here with his permission.
1 'How comes that blood all over your shirt?
My son, come tell it to me.'
'It is the blood of my little guinea pig —
O mother, please let me be.
It is the blood of my little guinea pig —
Oh mother, please let me be.'
2 'Your guinea pig's blood is not so red.
My son, come tell it to me.'
'It is the blood of my little hunting dog
That played in the field for me.
It is the blood of my little hunting dog
That played in the field for me.'
3 'Your dog lies yonder, O my son,
And this it could not be.'
'It is the blood of my old roan horse
That pulled the plow for me.
It is the blood of my old roan horse
That pulled the plow for me.'
4 'How come that blood all over your shirt?
My son, you must tell to me.'
'It is the blood of my little brother Bill
Who I killed in the field today.
It is the blood of my little brother Bill
Who I killed in the field today.
5 'And what will you do when your father comes home?
My son, come tell it to me.'
'I'll put my feet in the bottom of a boat
I'll put my feet in the bottom of a boat
And sail across the sea.
And sail across the sea.'