My Lady's Slipper- Sharpes (WV) c.1850 Cox B
[From Folk-Songs of the South; John Harrington Cox, 1925. His notes follow.
R. Matteson 2012, 2015]
B. "My Lady's Slipper." Communicated by Mr. R. S. Ridenour, Farmington, Marion County, January 1916; obtained from the Rev. W. J. Sharpes, who learned it about seventy years ago.
These two stanzas sometimes occur by themselves; so Child, in, 512 (from "the Carolina mountains"); Cox, C; Focus, iv, 49. But they easily become associated with any song on the theme of lovers' parting. They turn up, accordingly, (1) in "The New-Slain Knight" (Child, No. 263); (2) in some forms of "The True Lover's Farewell" (as Cox, No. 137, and Campbell and Sharp, No. 61 A; Belden's collection); (3) in one version of "The Rejected Lover" (Campbell and Sharp, No. 56 A); (4) in "Cold Winter's Night" (Shearin, Modern Language Review, vi, 514; cf. Shearin and Combs, p. 8), which is a cross between (2) and (3); (5) in some forms of "Careless Love" (Perrow, Journal, xxvm, 147, mixed with "The True Lover's Farewell"; Focus, in, 275); (6) in some versions of "The False Young Man" (Campbell and Sharp, No. 94 C; Babcock, Folk-Lore Journal, vn, 31, reprinted by Child, 111, 511); (7) in "Kitty Kline" (Bascom, Journal, xxn, 240; cf. F. C. Brown, p. 9); (8) in "Blue-eyed Boy" (Belden's Missouri collection) ; in (9) in a comic ditty (Lomax, The North Carolina Booklet, July, 1911, xi, 29). The same stanzas, alone or in combination, are recorded in Bulletin, Nos. 2-10. They occur also in a West Virginia text of "The House Carpenter" (No. 25 C), in "John Hardy" (No. 35 E), and apparently in a North Carolina version of "Lord Randal," Child, No. 12 (F. C.Brown, p. 9). Cf. Reed Smith, Journal, XXVIII, 201, 202.
1 "Who will shoe your pretty little feet?
Who will glove your hand?
Who will kiss your sweet rosy lips,
When I'm in a foreign land?"
2 "My father will shoe my pretty little feet,
My mother will glove my hand,
And you may kiss my sweet rosy lips,
When you come from the foreign land."