Mary Hebrew- Hartsell (NC) 1915 Lumpkin
[From Southern Folk Ballads Volume 2, McNeil; 1988. Collected by Ben Lumpkin. McNeil's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2015]
This ballad is usually known as "The Wife of Usher's Well," the title used by Francis J. Child, who included it as number 79 in his ten-volume work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Although of British origin the song seems to have survived better in the United States than in the old country, most reported versions being from the American South. The earliest known printing of the ballad is in Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), and thus it dates from at least the latter half of the eighteenth century and is possibly even older.
American versions generally differ from British ones in the following ways: (1) the revenants are children, frequently girls, rather than grown boys; (2) the cursing of the waters episode is omitted, but the mother usually prays for the return of her children; (3) the ghosts refuse earthly pleasures in many cases because the Savior stands yonder; (4) the ghosts are not recalled at the crowing of the cocks; (5) the children leave home to learn their grammarie; and (6) the folk belief that tears for the dead wet the winding sheets and disturb the peace is present. "Grammarie" is an obsolete word meaning either general knowledge or magic. The ghostly nature of the children is frequently assumed without actually being stated.
The lyrics given here differ from most in that it is suggested that the children return as angels rather than ghosts. Also unusual is the use of the word pinions in stanza 8; according to the informant it referred to angel's wings." There is, of course, the possibility that the presence of pinions in this version is merely an accident of oral transmission but it could also be a survival from an old version in which the children clearly return as angels. The present text was collected in September 1951 by
Ben Gray Lumpkin from Mrs. Pearl Hartsell, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She learned this song and others in her repertoire about 1915 from her mother, Mrs. Henry Connell, and her grandmother, Mrs. James Taylor Burris, both from Stanly County, North Carolina.
Mary Hebrew- sung by Mrs. Pearl Hartsell Chapel Hill, NC 1951, learned circa 1915
Mary Hebrew had three little babes,
And she sent them off to school.
She sent them away to a foreign land
To learn their grammaries.
They hadn't been gone but a very short time,
About three months and a day,
When a hurricane came all over the land
And swept her babes away.
"O, King in Heaven," aloud she cried-
"The King who wears the crown-
Come bring me home my three little babes,
Tonight or in the morning soon'"
It was not long, about Christmas time,
When the nights grew long and cool,
Come flying home her three little babes
Unto their mother's room.
She fixed a table in the hall,
And on it Put bread and wine,
"Come on and eat, my three little babes;
Come eat and drink o' my wine."
"O, we'll eat none of your bread, Mother dear,
But we'll drink none of your wine;
For yonder stands our Savior dear,
And shortly we must go."
She fixed the bed in the back side room,
And on it put a clean sheet,
And on the top spread a golden cloth,
For her three babes to sleep.
"Rise up, rise up," cried the eldest one.
"For the pinions are growing strong,
And yonder stands our Savior dear,
And shortly we must go.
"Dark clouds of dirt are at our head.
Grass grows at our feet.
You've shed enough tears for us, Mother dear,
To wet our winding sheet."