The House Carpenter- Miller (NC) c.1939 Brown 4A(2)

The House Carpenter- Miller (NC) c.1939 Brown 4A(2);

[Single stanza with music from: The Brown Collection of NC Folklore; Volume 4, 1957. Notes from Volume 2 follow. A Brown Collection editor says, "Another record is identical with this version" but text is not to be found. The text is similar to Brown A which could be used after the opening stanza.

R. Matteson 2013]

40. James Harris (The Daemon Lover)

(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.

A(2) 'The House Carpenter.' Sung by Myra Barnett Miller. Recorded probably at Lenoir, August 1939, 1940, or 1941. Another record is identical with this version, and it contains all the stanzas. Towards the end, however, the singer gradually rises in pitch, and finishes a whole tone above the level on which she  started.

For melodic relationship of. ***FSF 313, No. 168B, measures 3-4; **ibid.  No. 168A, measure 7 with 6 in our version; SharpK i 245, No. 35B and 252,  No. 35J; TBV 593, No. 40H and more so, 594, No. 40V, measures 1-4; SCSM  400, version A ('James Harris'), measures 3-4; FSS 524, No. 25L, measures  3-4; *FSSH 116, No. 23C, measures 1-2; SharpK i 209, No. 28B ('The Maid  Freed from the Gallows'), measure 6; FSRA 38, No. 18.

Scale : Dorian, plagal. Tonal Center : 4,4). e. Structure: aa1bb1 (2,2,2,2)  ab