"Father, said she, you have done me wrong,
For ye have married me on a childe young man,
And my bonny love is long
Agrowing, growing, deary,
Growing, growing, said the bonny maid."
But the most genuine form is on an Aberdeen Broadside, B.M., 1871, f. This, the real Scottish ballad, has verses not in the English, and the English ballad has a verse or two not in the Scottish.
I have received an Irish version as sung in Co. Tipperary; it is in six verses, but that about the "Trees so High" is lacking. The rhyme is more correct than that of any of the printed versions, and the lines run in triplets. One verse is—
"O Father, dear Father, I'll tell you what we'll do,
We'll send him off to college for another year or two,
And we'll tie round his college cap a ribbon of the blue,
To let the maidens know he is married."
In one of the versions I have taken down (Hannaford's and Aggett's) there were traces of the triplet very distinct, and the tune was akin to the Irish melody sent me, as sung by Mary O'Bryan, Cahir, Tipperary. Portions of the ballad have been forced into that of "The Cruel Mother" in Motherwell's MS., Child's "British and Scottish Ballads," i. p. 223. In this a mother gives birth to three sons at once and murders them; but after they are murdered—
"She lookit over her father's wa',
And saw three bonnie boys playing at the ba'."
Our melody is in the Phrygian mode, a scale which is extremely scarce in English folk-song. The only other example we know is in Ducoudray's book of the "Folk Melodies of Brittany."
The Scotch have two airs, one in Johnson's "Museum," the other in "The British Minstrel," Glasgow, 1844, vol. ii. p. 36, both totally distinct from ours.
That the ballad is English and not originally Scotch is probable, for Fletcher quotes it in "The Two Noble Kinsmen," 1634. He makes the crazy jailer's daughter sing us a snatch of an old ballad—
"For I'll cut my green coat, a foot above my knee,
And I'll clip my yellow locks, an inch below my eye,
Hey ninny, ninny, ninny;
He's buy me a white cut (stick) forth for to ride,
And I'll go seek him, through the world that is so wide,
Hey ninny, ninny, ninny."