The Brown Girl- Case (MO) 1916 Belden K
[Single stanza with music from Belden; Ballads and Songs--Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society; 1940. His notes follow (barely edited).
R. Matteson 2014]
Lord Thomas and Fair Annet
(Child 73)
Child has nine versions of this ballad (which has parallels in Scandinavian and Romance balladry), all but one of which are Scotch. This one, D, is an English broadside of the seventeenth century, frequently printed since and current also in oral tradition. And from it have come all the American versions as well as most of those gathered from oral tradition in Great Britain since Child's time. Two features that mark most of the Scotch texts : the contamination with Lady Margaret and Sweet William, at the opening and the close, and Annie's answer to the brown girl's question about her complexion that she got it where the brown girl will never get the like, viz. in her mother's womb- these have disappeared in the modern versions.* The rose and briar ending, too, which marks several of the Scotch versions and some of the later British texts (Aberdeenshire, Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, Devonshire) and is inconsistent with the triple burial (with which it is none the less combined in Gloucestershire and Devonshire and in Child's Dh, an Irish-American version), is infrequent in American texts, appearing only in NPM, TBV B, SCBB, SSSA, and Missouri J. In the broadside Lord Thomas is a bold forester, and he is so called in the Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Devonshire versions recently recorded. When this characterization appears in Ameriean texts (as it does in BBM A B C, NPM, TBV A B C, SharpK K, SCB B, and the Vermont, Indiana, and Nebraska texts) we may infer a rather close relation to print. Thomas is so described in The Forget-Me-Not Songster, which had wide circulation in America in the middle of the last century. Thomas never sends a messenger to Eleanor, as in Child C E F H I, but goes himself. In the great majority of the modem texts the lovers consult their respective mothers only, occasionally father and mother together; never does a sister (as in Child A B F G H) advise him to prefer the fair girl to the brown. Two elements of realism-or perhaps we should say brutality-are evidently valued, for they persist in almost all the American versions: after Thomas has cut off the brown girl's head he kicks it (or some equivalent phraseology) against the wall; and when he remarks Eleanor's pallor she asks him if he cannot see her own heart's blood come trickling down her knee. There is considerable variety in the way the mother's counsel is asked. Most often the language is 'come riddle my riddle, come riddle it all in (as) one.' In Missouri A it is, come riddle your sword,' and in Missouri D J, TBv I(1), SharpK L N it is 'riddle my (the, these) sport(s).' Many years ago (modern Language Notes XXII 263-4) I ventured the suggestion that sport here is a mishearing of sword and that the latter word points to an earlier belief in the potency of weapons in soothsaying. This peculiar wording appears only in the American versions.
The ballad has been found in oral tradition since Child's time in Aberdeenshire (LL, 54-7, 256), Hertfordshire (JFSS v 180-1), Staffordshire (Burne, Shropshire Folk Lore 651), Herefordshire (JFSS II 107), Gloucestershire (FSUT 135-7), Hampshire (JFSS II 106, tune only), Somerset (JFSS II 105-6, 109), and Devonshire (JFSS II 102-8); in Nova scotia (BSSNS 21-4, SBNS 8-10) and Newfoundland (BSSN 18-20); in Maine (BBM 126-84), Vermont (JAFL XVIII 128-30, VFSB 209-13), Massachusetts (JAFL XYIII 180, by way of New Jersey), Pennsylvania (JAFL XXIX 159, by way of Kansas; NPM 755-7), Maryland (ABS 27-31, by way of Nebraska), Virginia (TBVa- 797-220, SharpK I 120, 721, 127-9, FSSH 68-9, SCSM 106-18), West Virginia (FSS 45-64), Kentucky (JAFL XX 264-6, BKH 49-bt, FSI(M 26-88, TKMS 11-27, DD 88-90, SharpK I 124-G), Tennessee (JAFL XLII 262-5, sharpK, 119-20,722-3, FSSH 60-3, SFL,Q II G9), North Carolina (JAFL XXVIII 152, SSSA 41, SharpK I 115-6, 118-21, 129-81, BMFSB 16-T), South Carolina (SCB 109-20), Georgia (SharpK I 116-8, 121), Mississippi (FSM 78-87), Texas (PFLST X 144-6),Indiana (JAFL XITVIII 314-6), Illinois (TSSI IBG-T), and Iowa (MAFITS XXIX 5-7). Three of Child's D texts, g h i, are from Irish in America, showing the ballad known in Ireland, and one, f, is from New Brunswick. Cambiaire does not exactly locate his texts, so that ETWVIIB 84-6, 11b-6 may represent either Tennessee or Virginia.
Since American texts are so much alike and so numerous (TBV prints eighteen, SharpK thirty-one (several of them however only fragments with tunes), FSS nine). I shall not print here all the twelve in the Missouri collection. Four of them have already been printed in JAFL XIX.
*The first of these features is retained in the Aberdeenshire version, and what is perhaps a vestige of the second; and a little vestige is perhaps to be seen in TBV H and FSS E.
K. 'The Brown Girl,' sent me by Mrs. (Eva Warner) Case in 1916, one of the ballads known to her in childhood in Harrison County, where the settlers were of Virginia and Kentucky stock, with a sprinkling of Tennesseans, and many of the songs had been in the family from the time of their coming from England. Fourteen stanzas. The only text of this ballad in the Missouri collection- given with the tune.
She dressed herself in her lily-white robe,
Her waiting maid in green,
And every city that she passed through,
They took her to be some queen.
And every city that she passed through,
They took her to be some queen.