SOME QUAINT OLD BALLADS
By Virginia Chambers
Mammy used to sing them to us—those quaint, old ballads. Now, there are mammies and mammies, and our mammy considered herself a “quality lady.” She and all her family had always been house servants, and, as such, looked with utter contempt upon the “field hands.”
Mammy tried to live up to her exalted position; and while she had many of the characteristics of her race, she had tried to imitate “Ole Mistis” until her manners were almost ludicrously dignified and prim. As a result of this, the songs with which she entertained us were those she had heard from the grandees of old Virginia, when she was young. I am growing old myself, and Mammy was an old woman when I was a child, so her songs belong to many generations past, being, most of them, evidently from England.
I can only give them as I remember them, having never seen one of them in print; and as they are but a child’s recollections of an ignorant old negro’s songs, it is to be presumed that they are very faulty. However, even as we heard them, they seem worth preserving.
The mind can easily call up the picture—the locusts and catalpas clustered around the back porch of our old plantation home—Mammy in her low chair under our favorite tree—the baby in her lap—the group of children all around her, all waiting impatiently for her to croon the baby to sleep and go with us to gather the jasmine flowers for “Miss ’Gusta’s” pomatum, or the raspberries for “Ole Mistis’s” lunch.
We must have been of a sentimental turn, for the chief favorite was a doleful ditty, called
Lord Lovell