The House Carpenter- Muchler (MI) 1935 Gardner C
[From: Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan by Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner and Geraldine Jencks Chickering, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press: 1939. Their notes follow.
R. Matteson 2013]
10 THE HOUSE CARPENTER
(James Hams; The Daemon Lover, Child, No. 243)
The Michigan texts are most similar to Child B, although there are stanzas in the Child text which are replaced by others in the Michigan forms. (See Child, IV, 360-369.) For texts and references, with a discussion of the song, see Cox, pp. 139-149, and Davis, pp. 439-478. See also Barbour, JAFL, XLIX, 209-211; Barry, Eckstorm, and Smyth, pp. 304-310; Bulletin, VII, n; Eddy, No. 16; Greig, pp. 196-197; Hudson, pp. 19-21; Sandburg, pp. 66-67; Scarborough, pp. 150-159; Sharp, I, 244--258; Smith, pp. 151-155; Stout, pp. 11-13; and Thomas, pp. 172-173. None of these texts has lines similar to stanza 7 of Michigan C, with its premonition of disaster, which is perhaps a slight remnant of superstition.
C. Sung in 1935 by Mrs. Charles Muchler, Kalkaska, who learned the song when she was a child. A good text of eleven stanzas, of which stanza 7 is different from any in A and B.
7 She dressed herself in rich array
And with the sailor went;
But as she stepped upon the deck,
Her heart with grief was rent.