Pretty Polly- Mayme Baker (KY) 1917 Sharp H
[Single stanza with music from English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians; Volume I; 1917 and 1932. Collected by Cecil J. Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. Edited by Maud Karpeles. The 1932 notes follow.
This is a standard US opening stanza text; the last line is corrupt. Sharp spells informants name Mayene Baker (a student at Berea?) in his diary.
R. Matteson 2016]
No. 49. The Cruel Ship's Carpenter (1932 notes)
Texts without tunes:—Broadsides by Pitts, Jackson & Son, and Bloomer (Birmingham). Ashton's A Century of Ballads, p. 101.
Texts with tunes :—Christie's Traditional Ballad Airs, ii. 99. Journal of the Folk-Song Society, i. 172. Folk Songs from Somerset, No. 83 (published also in English Folk Songs, Selected Edition, i. 4, and One Hundred English Folk-Songs, p. 4). Cox's Folk Songs of the South , pp. 308 (see also further references) and 528. Wyman and Brockway's Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs, p. 110, and Lonesome Tunes, p. 79. Journal of American Folk-Lore, xx. 262.
H. [Pretty Polly] The Cruel Ship's Carpenter- Sung by Miss MAYME BAKER at Berea, Madison Co., Ky., May 23, 1917
Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, come go with me,
Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, come go with me,
Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, come go with me
O'er hills and valleys and dales to see.