Seven Sons Bold- Shifflett (VA) 1961 Foss
[My title. From Anglo-American Folksong Style; Abrahams and Foss; 1968. George Foss who collected this excellent version in 1961 from Robert Shiflett, wrote about the region From White Hall to Bacon Hollow. Compare to Sharp E.
R. Matteson 2014]
George Foss, From White Hall to Bacon Hollow 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.
[Seven Sons Bold]- As sung by Robert Shifflett, 1961
1. "Rise ye up, rise up my seven sons bold,
Put on your armour bright,
That it may not be said that a daughter of mine,
Can stay with Lord Thomas overnight."
2. "Hold on Margaret, my love, be brave," cried he,
"Hold this rein in your white hand,
That I may fight your seven brothers bold,
As in yonders green meadow they stand."
3. Lady Margaret did watch the battle so grim,
She never shed one tear,
Until she saw her seven brothers fall,
And the father she loved so dear.
4. "Lady Margaret, my love, will you go, will you go?
Or will you here abide?"
"Oh I must go, Lord Thomas, you know,
You have left me now without a guide."
5. He placed Lady Margaret on the milk white steed,
Himself upon the bay,
Drew his buckler down by his side,
And then rode bleeding away.
6. Lord Thomas died of his bloody, bloody wounds,
Lady Margaret died of grief,
Lady Thomas died from the loss of her son,
The eleventh one that must be.
7. They buried bold Thomas on the church's right side,
Lady Margaret they laid upon the left,
They would not be parted before they died,
And they were united in death.
8. Out of one grave grew a climbing rose,
Out of the other grew a briar,
They grew till they met at the top of the church,
And they did grow no higher.