The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #646 Message #1808
Posted By: Ralph Butts
31-Jan-97 - 11:18 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Jersey City (from Cordelia's Dad)
Subject: Lyr Add: THE BUTCHER BOY (Clancy Brothers)
It sounds like "Butcher Boy", which has countless variants. But what's the Jersey City connection.
Done by the Weavers as "Wild Goose Grasses", this is "The Butcher Boy" as done by the Clancy Brothers.
...Tiger
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THE BUTCHER BOY -- Clancy Brothers
In London city, where I did dwell,
A butcher boy I loved right well;
He courted me my life away,
But now with me he will not stay.
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
I wish I was a maid again;
A maid again I ne'er will be
'Till cherries grow on an ivy tree.
"I wish my baby it was born
And smiling on its daddy's knee;
And me, poor girl, to be dead and gone,
With the long green grass growing over me."
She went upstairs to go to bed,
And calling to her mother, said,
"Give me a chair till I sit down
And a pen and ink till I write down."
At every word she dropped a tear,
At every line cried, "Willie, dear,
Oh, what a foolish girl was I,
To be led astray by a butcher boy."
He went upstairs and the door he broke;
He found her hanging from a rope.
He took his knife and he cut her down,
And in her pocket these words he found:
"Oh, make my grave large, wide and deep.
Put a marble stone at my head and feet;
And in the middle, a turtledove,
That the world may know that I died for love."