Henry's Songbook

Hard is the fortune of all womankind
They're always controlled they're always confined
Controlled by their parents until they are wives
Then they're slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives

I know a young maiden her story is sad
She'd always been courted by a wagoner's lad
He courted her duly by night and by day
But now he is loading and he's going away

Your parents don't like me because I am poor
They say I'm not worthy of entering your door
I work for my living my money's my own
And if they don't like me they can leave me alone

(as sung by Hamish Imlach & Muriel Graves)

[1961:] [This] and On Top of Old Smokey are first cousins in the complex Anglo-American family of folksongs which includes East Virginia, The Cuckoo, Sugar Baby, Pretty Polly and probably a few dozen other folksongs. Originally, it was a British broadside ballad, and then it became transformed into an American lyric folksong, ignoring the sage advice of Polonius, and freely borrowing and lending verses to and from a score of other songs. (Reprint Sing Out 3, 138)

[1967:] We have suggested the majority of English songs tell a story or at least purport to. But there are also songs that are simply expressions of mood and nothing more. They are not numerous but they are confusing in their variety because they make use of a stock of symbolic or epigrammatic verses that are combined and re-combined in song after song, so that often it is hard to tell one piece from another. This stock of common-place lyrical 'floaters' [...] is relatively restricted, comprising perhaps not many more than fifty tropes in all [...]. The verses are usually concerned with love, especially love betrayed or denied, and a repertory of such verses provides a handy kit for making countless songs almost at will. [...] Fluid as the use of these floating stanzas may be, sets of them sometimes show signs of crystallizing into specific songs [e.g. The wagoner lad]. [...]

Few of these floationg lyrics are datable. They are the product of some sentimental flowering of the spirit, but whether they were all produced at the same period or represent the accretion of centuries would be hard to say. [...] Occasionally we have a wisp of information. For instance, there is a relatively commonplace stanza [see 1 above] (though it occurs more often in America than in England). We know that this floater occurs in a stage song of 1734, 'The ladies' case', [...] but even so, we may not be sure whether the folk took it from the stage or whether it entered the playhouse by way of the cottage. (Lloyd, England 178ff)

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