The House Carpenter- Best (NC) pre1943 Brown I
[No date given all versions were before 1943. From: The Brown Collection of NC Folklore, Volume 2, 1952. Their notes follow. This version follows Brown A and the last verse is given, but incorrectly- since the rhyme is misplaced:
'Here's a curse, here's a curse
To all seafaring men.
A-ruinin' of lives, robbing of house carpenters
And taking away of their wives.'
Chappell collected a version from the same area (NC coastal region) in 1924 with a similar ending:
Cursed be to the seafaring men,
And cursed to be their lives;
[For the ] robbing of the house-carpenter[s],
And coaxing away their wives.
We can see that with a re-ordering of the lines it becomes:
'Here's a curse, here's a curse to all seafaring men.
[For] a-ruinin' of lives,
Robbing of house carpenters
And taking away of their wives.'
R. Matteson 2013]
40. James Harris (The Daemon Lover) Brown Collection
(Child 243)
If the various traditional versions of this ballad all go back, as Child believed, to the long-winded, pedestrian seventeenth-century broadside of 'James Harris,' they constitute something of an argument for Barry's doctrine of communal re-creation. For its range as traditional song, see BSM 79, and add New Hampshire (NGMS 95-7), Tennessee (SFLQ xi 127-8), North Carolina (FSRA 38-40), Florida (SFLQ viii 160-1), the Ozarks (OFS I 166-76), Ohio (BSO 70-7), Indiana (BSI 136-48, JAFL lvii 14-15), Illinois (JAFL LX 131-2), Michigan (BSSM 54-8), and Wisconsin (JAFL LIT 46-7, originally from Kentucky). Few regional collections made in this country fail to record it ; [1] it is therefore surprising that Child knew, apparently, only one American text and that a fragment. It is almost always called in America 'The House Carpenter.' The notion that the lover from the sea is a revenant or a demon, present in the original broadside and less definitely in some of the other versions in Child, has faded from most American texts; with us it is a merely domestic tragedy. And perhaps for that very reason it is one of the favorites of American ballad singers. There are some fourteen texts in the North Carolina collection, most of them holding pretty closely to one version. A full text of this version is given first and most of the others described by reference to this.
Footnote for above:
1. There are traces of it in our K and M versions.
I. 'The House Carpenter.' Reported by L. W. Anderson from Nag's Head, Dare county: "Sung to me by Mrs. J. A. Best at whose home I board. Her mother sang this also, and they lived on an island called Collington twelve miles from Kitty Hawk." It is substantially the same as A with some differences in the final stanza:
'Here's a curse, here's a curse
To all seafaring men.
A-ruinin' of lives, robbing of house carpenters
And taking away of their wives.'
['Here's a curse, here's a curse to all seafaring men,
A-ruinin' of lives,
Robbing of house carpenters
And taking away of their wives.']