Barbra Allen
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 13/04/2020

Day 28 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

This starts a new chapter is Sandburg's American Songbag: TARNISHED LOVE TALES REVOLUTIONARY or COLONIAL ANTIQUES. And they are antique ballads, primarily LOTS of verses and no choruses. One, in fact is modal (if I'm not mistaken) and can't be played with a guitar because it's not tonal (major or minor key). So these are a stubble for me and we'll just see how it goes.

Sandburg describes the song in the following way: "Hard-hearted Barbra Allen is a girl who figures in hundreds of ballads. In nearly all of them Willie dies for love of her and she, with a wasted heart, goes into the grave beside him. That is the story. But the last verse has a sequel. The rose rises from one grave, the briar from the other;

the two climb to the top of the old church tower and there intertwine. So ends the story. It has been told and sung in hundreds of dialects. Usually the tune is stale, flat, monotonous. The one given here has long been a favorite of mine and the friend who gave it to me, H. L. Davis, the Oregon poet who came from the mountains of Georgia. The text is from the R. W. Gordon collection. Sometimes, in the singing of this song, I get the feel of old, gnarled, thornapple trees and white crabapple blossoms printed momentarily on a blue sky, of evanescent things, of the paradox of tender and cruel forces operating together in life. Perhaps something of that paradox working in the hearts of people has kept the Barbra Allen story alive and singing through three centuries and more."