In Jersey Town- English nurse (VA) 1889 Babcock
[From: The London Ballads by W. H. Babcock; The Folk-Lore Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1889), pp. 27-35
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. Babcock's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2017]
THEY come from that prosperous but out-of-the-way county of Virginia, in the corner between the Potomac and the Blue Ridge. Plain people of the conservative overseer and small - tenant class have transmitted them from mother to daughter, through the years and lives that have passed since the first settlement, as in England before it. Of course they do not think of writing them down, and know nothing of the books in which the relics of balladry are treasured.
One evening as we approached, in the dusk, our home near Washington, a ballad, then heard for the first time, came chanted to us out of the open windows. The new nurse girl, white, and from up the river, was singing the smaller children to sleep. When the song of many words ended, another was taken up, and after it.
IN JERSEY TOWN.
In Jersey town, where I do dwell,
A butcher boy I love so well,
He's courted me my heart away,
And now with me he will not stay.
There is a name in this same town,
Where my true love goes and sets himself down;
He'll take a strange girl on his knee,
And tell to her what he won't to me.
O grief, O grief, I'll tell you why,
Because she's got more gold than I:
Her gold will melt, her soul will fly,
In need of time she'll be poor as I.
She went upstairs to make her bed,
And not one word to her mother said.
Her mother, she came up the stair,
Cries, "What's the matter, my daughter, dear?"
"Mother, mother, you do not know
The grief and wound my heart is in.
Go, bring a chair, and set me down,
A pen and ink to write it down."
On every line she dropped a tear,
In calling home her Willie, dear.
When her father he came home,
Says, Where's my dearest daughter gone?"
Up the stairs he broke the door,
And there he found her on a rope.
He took his knife, and he cut her down,
And in her bosom these lines were found.
Go dig her grave both deep and wide,
A marble stone at both head and foot,
A turtle dove all on her breast,
To show she hung herself for love.