No. 19 Barbara Allen
In the first quarter of the century, this celebrated ballad was still used in New England as a children’s game or dance at evening parties. We have here, perhaps, the latest English survival, in cultivated society, of a practice which had once been universal. It is noteworthy that while, in the town of which we speak,69 the establishment, at the period alluded to, of a children’s dancing-school was bitterly opposed, and the children of “church members” were hardly permitted to attend, no such prohibition applied to amusements like this, which were shared in irrespective of sectarian prejudice, by boys as well as by girls.
Our informant describes the performers as standing in couples, consisting each of a boy and a girl, facing each other. An elderly lady, who was in particular request at children’s parties on account of her extensive stock of lore of the sort, sang the ballad, to which the dancers kept time with a slow metrical movement, balancing without any considerable change of place. At the final words, “Barbara Allen,” which end every stanza, a courtesy took the place of the usual refrain. The whole performance is described as exceedingly pretty, stately, and decorous. It cannot be doubted that the version of the ballad sung was traditional, but we have not been able to secure it.
Footnotes
53 The song exhibits numerous marks of antiquity. “Picks up a pin” was originally, no doubt, “pulls at the pin.” The word “garret” here appears to correspond to the Scandinavian “high-loft,” the upper part and living-room of an ancient house. The third verse is a very ancient ballad commonplace—
Shee’s as soft as any silk,
And as white as any milk.
“Ballad of Kinge Adler,” in the Percy MS.
Instead of “Water, water, wild-flowers,” as printed on the next page, we find in Philadelphia, “Lily, lily, white-flower,” which may have been the original, and reminds us of the refrains of certain ballads. In Yorkshire, England, “Willy, willy, wall-flower.”
A specimen of the quintessence of absurdity is the following street-song:
Swallow, swallow, weeping
About a willow tree,
All the boys in Fiftieth Street
Are dying down below;
Excepting —— ——
His love he can’t deny,
For he loves —— ——
And she loves him beside, etc.
Notwithstanding the vulgarity of these stanzas, and of others which are employed for the same purpose, the practice which they illustrate—namely, the adaptation of a ballad to the dance by uniting with it a game-rhyme—is no doubt ancient. We have other examples in the numbers which follow.
54 “Lines told to Lydia Jackson (now Mrs. R. W. Emerson, of Concord, Mass.) by her aunt, Joanna Cotton, in 1806-7-8, in Plymouth.”
55 Observe how the nursery song differs from the children’s dance. The nurse wishes to persuade the little child in her lap that paring nails is a mark of great regard and affection, as, while performing that office, she chants the ballad to amuse her charge.
56 “It is on a summer’s tide, when ladies’ hearts are free and gay, when they go arrayed in ermine and silk. The hart strikes his horn against the linden, and the fish leaps in the stream.”—Icelandic Ballad.
57 Some little friends, feeling the unsatisfactoriness of the fragment, added a couplet to the dance—
O Mary, O Mary, your true love’s not slain,
The king sends you a letter to turn round again.
58
Eh! la clinquet (?) de lettres, que nouvelle est celle-ci?
Eh! ce sont des nouvelles qu’il faut changer d’ami.
59 Or, “Three gold wishes, three good kisses, and a slice of ginger!”
60 Or, “strong.”
61 Or, “king’s daughter,” “queen’s daughter.”
62 See French ballad referred to in the Appendix.
63 Or, “King George’s son.” For convenience sake, the last couplet of the first version is printed with the melody.
64 For if my mother should chance to know,
She’d make my blood to fall.
—Version of Sir Egerton Brydges.
65 And first came out the thick, thick blood,
And syne came out the thin;
And syne came out the bonny heart’s blood,
There was nae mair within.
Jamieson.
66 When bells were rung, and mass was sung,
And a’ the bairns came hame,
When every lady gat hame her son,
The lady Maisry gat nane.
Jamieson.
67 Sallow; willow.
68 In other versions it is “Testament” or “Catechism.”
69 Keene, New Hampshire.