The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #14344   Message #626868
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
12-Jan-02 - 10:27 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: The Butcher boy
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: The Butcher boy
There's a list of links to quite a lot of related material here and elsewhere in this earlier discussion:  Hanged I shall be.  At least one of the previous discussions here gave the date and location of the original murder, if I recall correctly; from Bruce Olson, so pretty reliable.

The text at Henry and Susanne's Songbook, quoted above, came from a record made by Enoch Kent, who learned it from Jeannie Robertson.  Disregarding the numerous small changes characteristic of aural learning (dark and the rovin' eye instead of dark and rolling eyes, for instance) there are two changes from her traditional version which impair the sense:

Verse 6, line 2: Oran should be Roarin[g]

Verse 10, line 2: Gates should be fires.

We may as well have a tune available for this set, so here is a midi made from notation in Jeannie Robertson: Emergent Singer, Transformative Voice (James Porter and Herschel Gower, 1995).  Until it gets to the  Mudcat Midi Pages,  it can be heard via the  South Riding Folk Network  site:

The Butcher Boy (midi)

The notation is of the kind that offers several alternatives in many places, so I've gone for the combination of notes which seems best to fit the first verse.  In one place it has been necessary to split a note to accommodate the lyric.