John Over The Hazel Green- Morris (VA) pre1936
[From "A Song catcher" by Dorothy Scarborough; pre1937. Scarborough's two versions are part of the Virginia repository that is apparently a single version that has spread throughout one area in Virginia. Scarborough's title John Over The Hazel Green (Hazelgreen) is actually the correct name for most of the Virginia versions. Here's some information focused on the Shifflet family from whom three versions were collected (Victoria Shifflett Morris; Raz Shiflett and Robert Shiflett). It's likely that Polly Morris is kin to the Shiflett's or as Victoria Shiflett Morris (the same approximate date 1933 as Polly's 1936 version), married into the Morris family. Both of the ballads are very similar.
The area (although it was found in other locations) of Virginia that the Shifletts lived became the repository for a version of this ballad. The Virgina Folk-Lore Society, under the direction of C. Alphonso Smith (who died in 1924) and later John Stone and Kyle Davis Jr., collected eleven texts and three melodies (Sharp collected one in 1918; Scarborough- two; Davis More Ballads- one; Foss- one). At the time their book, Traditional Ballads was being completed (c.1928) there were no other versions of John of Hazelgreen collected in the US (that would change as Barry published a version from Maine in 1929).
George Foss, who wrote an excellent article titled, From White Hall to Bacon Hollow, collected an excellent version in 1961 from Robert Shiflett, who was Raz Shiflett's son (see also Davis H; collected from Raz). Here are some excerpts:
From White Hall to Bacon Hollow is about a place and about its culture and people. I have granted myself the author's indulgence of selecting a title significant in its double meaning. White Hall to Bacon Hollow is a stretch of twisting country road, Virginia route 810, crossing the line between Albemarle and Greene Counties.
The earliest settlers of importance to the area were members of the Brown family. The patriarch of the Virginia Browns was Benjamin Brown, who began acquiring land in Albemarle County in 1747. He amassed six thousand acres of what was to become known as Brown's Cove. Included in these holdings was a tract patented to him by King George III in 1750.
It is of importance at this point to mention Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr., who was a collector of ballads and folksongs specifically of Virginia. He was not a collector in the same sense as Sharp, that is a field worker and face-to-face gatherer of songs. He was more in the mold of Francis James Child, the great collector-editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, that is, he served to gather and organize, to sift and evaluate the field work of numerous amateur, hobbyist and professional collectors. As early as 1929 he produced Traditional Ballads of Virginia; in 1949 he published Folksongs of Virginia and More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, all three under the auspices of the Virginia Folklore Society. A courtly gentleman “of the old school,” he was professor of English literature at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a great span of time. It was professor Davis who was Paul Clayton Worthington's teacher at the University during the 1950's and inspired Paul's interest in balladry and folksong.
Two later collectors who visited and worked in the White Hall-Bacon Hollow area were Richard Chase and professor Winston Wilkinson whose manuscripts are now kept by the University of Virginia. They were the first collectors to record the songs of some of the finest singers in the region, Ella Shiflett and Victoria Shiflett Morris as early as 1935.
Some of the family names still found in northwest Albemarle County and Greene County date from pre-Revolutionary times: Brown, Frazier and Jones. Other names commonly found are Walton, Powell, Sandridge and Wood. But by far the most commonly found are Morris and Shiflett. This makes the tracing of relationships very difficult since various branches of the family are only very distantly related but share the same name. Robert Shiflett (designated “Raz's Robert,” i.e. Erasmus' son Robert, to distinguish him from the region's numerous other Robert Shifletts) speculates that the family was originally descended from French mercenaries brought over by Lafayette to aid the colonies in their War of Independence.
(B) JOHN OVER THE HAZEL GREEN- Polly Morris, of Yellow Branch, sang this for me (Scarborough, pre 1936) into the Dictaphone and gave me her copy written out. [Copied by Scarborough without editing for spelling and punctuation.]
1. As I walked out one fair May morning,
all down by the green wood side,
and their I saw a pretty fair miss
and all alone she cried.
I drew myself a near to her
To listen to what she had to say,
and all her lamentation was
John over the hazel green.
2. You air welcome home,
you air welcome home,
you air welcome home with me.
you may have my oldest son
a husbin for to be,
I don't want your oldest son,
He's neather lord nor king.
I never intend to be the bride
of none save John over the hazel green.
3. His arms is long, his sholders broad,
Hes the flower among all our knights.
His hair hangs down like links of gold.
John over the hazel green,
If ever I forsaken you
I pray heaven will forsaken me
and take me down to the torment place
and thair forever be.
4. Its forty times he kissed her cheeks,
and forty times her chin,
and forty times her ruby lips
and led his lady in.
The ballad omits to mention why John had not spoken for himself before. But gentlemen in ballads were often tongue-tied.