The Green Woods of Si-bo-ney-o: White (ME) c1810
[From British Ballads from Maine, version C. This is similar to her husband's version (version B) version and it is unknown if they are from the same source (which is an oversight by Barry and all)- read notes below. When her husband Captain White was in the military in 1915, he (and I assume they) lived at Murray on Prince Edwards Island. Barry has assigned a date of circa 1810 which is presumptuous, but I'm using it.
Barry's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
(Barry and all's notes)
BRITISH BALLADS FROM MAINE- THE CRUEL MOTHER
(Child 20)
We have found four excellent texts and two good fragments of "The Cruel Mother" in Maine. Fragment C is undoubtedly from Scotland, and, judging from the refrain, the B-text probably came from there also. One of the other texts was learned from Irish girls, but it shows no great peculiarities. Indeed, Mrs. Morse's statement that, although she heard it sung in Ireland a good many times, it was always in English and never in Gaelic, implies that the Irish form was imported from England. In Nova Scotia, Professor Mackenzie found it under the name of "The Greenwood Siding," which is closely similar to the common name for the song in Maine. Perhaps attention should be called to the fact that the people of maritime Maine and of parts of Nova Scotia are largely of the same stock. Before the American Revolution, over-populated Cape Cod sent out many bodies of emigrants to the eastward; and songs from widely separated points along the eastern coast may have come from the same village, or even the same hearthstone, on Cape Cod a century and a half ago.
The Maine texts found are sufficiently similar not to need any extended comparison with each other. Most of the variations can be accounted for as omissions. It is possible to take the stanzas we have and by arranging them in order to make one long ballad of twenty-three verses, which would not only include all our Maine texts, but all Professor Cox found in the South and several of Professor Child's texts, which are largely fragmentary. Such an arrangement, although not assuming to be the original ballad, has a working value to a collector, who can fit his fragments into place by following the tabulation: it is
perhaps as justifiable a reconstruction as the creation of an extinct animal from a fossil bone.
C. "The Green Woods of Si-bo-ney-o." Fragment, October, 1929, from recitation of Mrs. John T. White, wife of Captain White. She formerly knew the whole song, but now could recall only a few lines, chiefly interesting from the fourth line and from her knowing that they are the remnants of a Scotch text brought over by her grandmother, probably about 1810, from Dumfriesshire.
She took her penknife from her breast,
And it was keen and sharp;
She drove it into her babies' heart,
And she covered them with marble stones
In the green woods of Si-bo-ney-o.
Then she went back to her father's hall,
And she seen those pretty babes,
And she said she would love to have those pretty babes,
In the green woods of Si-bo-ney-o.