I once had a piece in Folk Review, suggesting that the somewhat garbled 2nd line of Black Is The Color, common to Lizzie Roberts, Niles, et al, of 'rosy fair', seemed to furnish a, perhaps remote, echo of Edmund Spenser's song to Elisa, Queen of the Shepherds, obviously a pastoral idealisation of Queen Elizabeth I, in the April eclogue of his The Shepheardes Calender [sic, 1579]:

"The redde rose medled with the White yfere,
In either cheeke depeincten liuely chere." [sic spelling passim].

(The red rose mixed together with the white paint lively cheer in each of her cheeks)

'Yfere' meant 'together' ~~ no connection with fairness, but would sound so. {A pretty-well obsolete word even when Spenser was writing ~~ he acknowledged a great debt to Chaucer, his 'well of English undefiled', who flourished 200 years earlier, and so affected an obsolescent style and vocabulary.}

Probably a fanciful association; but perhaps just worth taking into consideration as a possible distant source. The chiming redolence of 'rosy fair' with 'rose ... yfere' raises a distinct echo in my mind. Could Spenser's pastoral 'shephearde' Hobbinol, singing in praise of an idealised Gloriana, have descended through who knows what anfractuous ways, to Mrs Lizzie Roberts in N Carolina singing in praise of an unnamed narrator's dark-haired love?

~Michael~




~Michael~