The Cambric Shirt- Kinkdale (MO) c1886 Belden A
[From Ballads and Songs collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society; Belden, 1940. Belden's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
The Elfin Knight
(Child 2)
Of the riddle ballads admitted to Child's collection this appears to be the best remembered both in the old world and in the New. It has been recorded from Aberdeenshire (LL 1-2) and frorn Ireland. (OIFMS No. 117, JFSS III 12-3); from Yorkshire (ECS 12-3), Northumberland, (ECS 6-7), Sussex (JFSS I 83), Wiltshire (JFSS II 2I2, III 274-5, FSUT 221-2), and Somerset (FSSom No. 64) ; from Maine (JAFL XXX 284-5, with an excellent bibliographical note by Kittredge; BBM 3-11), Vermont (VFSB 194-6, GGMS 58-9), Massachusetts (JAFL VII 228-9, XVIII 49-50, 212, 213-4), Rhode Island (JAFL XVIII 50-1, 218), Pennsylvania (NPM 129), Kentucky (SharpK I1), North Carolina (SharpK I 2), Georgia (JAFL XIII 120-2), Texas (JAFL XXVI 174-5, PFLST x 137-8), Illinois (FSSH 31, by way of Missouri), Nebraska (Pound, syllabus), and California (JAFL XIX 130-1). Barry (see JAFL xxx 284) found that it was printed in an American songbook about 1844 and as a Boston broadside a few years earlier. It has two types of refrain, represented respectively by the first and the second of the Missouri texts (the third Missouri text is really from Vermont). The 'rosemary and thyme' form is properly an intercalated refrain, constituting the second, and fourth lines of the stanza; but in Missouri it has been put together and reduced. The other refrain is also of the intercalated sort, but consists of nonsense syllables. As child remarked, the elf is an interloper, and he has entirely disappeared from modern versions.
A. 'The Cambric Shirt.' From Leroy Kinkade, University of Missouri, 1922; as learned from his-mother, who in turn learned it from her mother in Harrison county about 1886. The last two lines of stanza 1 are a refrain, sung with each stanza.
Make me a cambric shirt
Without a stitch of needle work,
And you shall be a true lover of mine,
Rosemary and thyme.
And wash it in yanders well
Where water never flowed and rain never fell.
And hang it on yanders thorn
That never bloomed or blossomed since Adam was born.
Buy me six acres of land
Between salt water and sea sand.
And plow it all over with a muley-cow's horn,
And seed it all over with one grain of corn.
And harrow it with a sickle of leather,
And gather it in with a pea-fowl's feather.
And thrash it against yanders wall
Without a grain of it to fall.
And take it to yanders mill
And every grain one barrel to fill,
And you shall be a true lover of mine,
Rosemary and thyme.