WILLIAM COOK

Come, all my good friends, with your melancholy song,
While the hour of the day is lating* along,
I'm going away to leave you; I cannot stay here long,
I am hasting away to my eternal home.

Down, down in yonders village, I have danced with you all,
Down, down in yonders village I learned my youthful bloom,
But little did I think I'd be called for so soon,
When the end of morning sun will going down at noon.

Therefore, young men, do take ahold of me,
And bend o'er my body in a grave six-by-three,
And heap the clods upon me and sing a solemn song,
While all my younger friends they are mourning around.

It's now I am dead and I'll be forgot,
My friends and relations remember me not,
Their cries will all be hushed and their tears all wiped away
While my poor body is mouldering and turning into clay.

My parents they thought they had brought me up well,
They thought they had taught me to shun the gates of hell,
Their prayers I have slighted, my only way I've took,
Remember this young man whose name is William Cook.

*lasting(?)

Sung by Harrison Burnett, Fayetteville, Arkansas, July 13, 1954. Collected by Mary Celestia Parler.

Source:
Mary Celestia Parler, An Arkansas Ballet Book (Fayetteville: University of Arksansas, 1963), p.55.