The House Carpenter- Thomas (NC) pre1943 Brown J
[No date given; from The Brown Collection, Volume 2, 1952. The Brown collectors date from 1912-1943 so pre1943 it the latest default date even though volume 2 was published in 1952. The full text, which probably resides in folder in a file cabinet somewhere, was not published but corresponds to version A.
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.
J. 'The House Carpenter.' Secured by Miss Jessie Hauser of Forsyth county from Mrs. James Thomas, of St. Jude. The text is substantially the same as A but lacks stanza 15 and combines stanzas 1 and 2 into:
'We've met, we've met, my own true love;
We've met, we've met,' said he.
'It's I could have married the King's daughter fair,
And she would have married me.
But I have forsaken her crown of gold,
And it's all for the love of thee.'