Old Lady in the North Country- (WV-PA) 1919 Cox C
[My title. From Folk-Songs of the South, John Harrington Cox, 1925, w/music. His notes follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
THE TWA SISTERS (Child, No. 10)
Three variants of this ballad have been found in West Virginia, two with the title, "The Miller's Two Daughters," and one with no title (cf. Cox, XIV, 159). A tells a complete story in which Johnny Ray loves the younger sister and buys her a gay gold ring and a beaver hat. The elder is jealous and pushes her sister into the stream, in which she floats down to her father's dam and is drowned. He drags her out and robs her. The father is hanged on the gallows and the sister is burned at the stake. B is fragmentary and the story is somewhat confused. There are three or four daughters of an "old lady," in which detail it agrees with C. The gift of the beaver hat is omitted. All three belong to the group represented by Child R, S, U, and Y, as is shown in particular by the refrain, the beaver hat, and the wicked miller. A freak of tradition in A makes him the father of the two sisters, and this relationship is involved in the title of B.
For American texts see Child, 1, 137 (Long Island, New York); Journal, XVIII, 130 (Barry; Rhode Island and Maine); XIX, 233 (Belden; Missouri and Kentucky) ; xxx, 287 (Missouri, Nebraska) ; Campbell and Sharp, No. 4 (North Carolina, Virginia) ; Sharp, Folk-Songs of English Origin Collected in the Appalachian Mountains, 2d Series, p. 18 (same as Campbell and Sharp, No. 4 C, but with stanzas from other variants). For references see Campbell and Sharp, p. 323; Kittredge, Journal, XXX, 286. Add Bulletin, Nos. 6-8.
C. [Old Lady in the North Country] No local title. Communicated by Mr. S. M. Kelley, Suter, Pennsylvania, 1919; collected in West Virginia.
1 There lived an old lady in the North Country,
The bough has been to me;
There lived an old lady, in the North Country,
She had daughters one, two, three,
True to my love,
My love be true to me.
2 There came a young man a-courting there,
And he made choice of the youngest there.
3 He made her a present of a beaver hat,
The oldest thought a heap of that.
4 "O sister, O sister, give my hand,
And I will give you my house and land."
5 "I will not give you my hand,
But I will marry that young man."
6 The miller picked up his drop hook,
And then he fished her out of the brook.
7 The miller got her ring,
The miller pushed her back again.
8 The miller was hung at his mill gate
For drowning my sister Kate.