Barbara Allen is the fictional subject of a well-known English ballad. While the versions vary, the story is the same throughout: Barbara Allen cruelly rejects a man who loves her and doesn’t even soften when she sees that he is dying of lovesickness. It is only when she hears the death bells ringing for him, and she realizes that she will soon die, too, that she sees the error of her ways. She dies, and in some versions they are buried next to each other in the graveyard. A rose grows out of his grave, and out of hers a briar bush grows. Sometimes the metaphor is extended even further, and the two plants join to form a lover’s knot over the graves.
In the United States, Cecil Sharp and Olive Campbell conducted extensive fieldwork in the southern Appalachian Mountains and wrote the seminal record of early English ballads. They discovered that a large number of antique English ballads were being sung in the region, having been preserved in geographic isolation by the mountainous terrain. Sharp and Campbell described ten different tunes and variant lyrics for Barbara Allen, sung by residents of Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, between 1907 and 1916. Judging from the archaic phrasing, which is evident in many of the transcriptions, it seems likely that this song came to America with early settlers. The film Songcatcher (2000), which features an excerpt of Barbara Allen, is loosely based on the efforts of these scholars.
Although “Barbara Allen” likely originated in Scotland, the earliest printed versions of this song were published in England in the popular format of the broadside. The earliest written mention of this song is from 1666 by Samuel Pepys, diarist and prominent collector of broadside ballads. Printed between 1675 and 1696, broadsides consisted of single sheets of paper that included song lyrics and woodcut illustrations. Broadsides were mass-produced and distributed cheaply for group singing in public houses (bars or pubs, often doubling as boardinghouses) and other gatherings. Broadsides did not contain any musical notation; instead, a new set of lyrics would indicate that the song should be sung to the tune of some better-known song. In the case of “Barbara Allen,” this was such a famous tune that readers interested in singing “Barbara Allen’s Cruelty” were reminded, however redundantly, to sing it to the tune of “Barbara Allen.”
Later versions appear to be shortened or modernized variations of the first printed version of this song or other early originals, like this version in the nineteenth-century Francis James Childs collection:
In Scarlet Town where I was bound
there was a fair Maid dwelling,
Whom I had chosen to be my own
and her name it was Barbara Allen. (Sargent and Kittredge 1904, 181)
The following two versions were sung in Georgia in the 1920s, as transcribed by Charles Bowie Millican:
One cold and cloudy day
in the month of May
When the roses was a budding
A young man lay on his death-bed
In love with Barb’ra Ellen.
All in the merry month of May,
Green buds when they were swelling,
Young Jimmie Groves on his death-bed lay
For the love of Barbara Allen. (Millican, 1929)
Barbara Allen’s rejection of her lover is generally unexplained or described as an overreaction to some imagined slight, as in this example:
O dinna ye mind, young man’ says she,
when the red wine ye were fillin’,
that ye made the healths go round and round,
and slighted Barbara Allen? (Anonymous)
A few versions include a moral at the end, which is illustrated in this version of “Barbara Allen” recorded by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch:
Farwell, she said, ye virgins all,
And shun the fault I fell in:
Henceforth take warning by the fall
Of cruel Barbara Allen. (Quiller-Couch 1919, 389)
Barbara Allen would have been a familiar tune among British emigrants to North America and elsewhere during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The song lives on to this day, and while shortened somewhat, it is still sung across the Southern and Western United States, primarily in the folk, country, and bluegrass traditions.
Robin Potter
See also Ballad; Blues as Folklore; Country Music as Folklore
Further Reading
Campbell, Olive Dame, and Cecil J. Sharp. 1917. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax. 1934. American Ballads and Folk Songs. New York: Macmillan.
Millican, Charles Bowie. 1929. “A Georgia Version of Barbara Allan.” Journal of American Folklore 42 (165): 303–305.
Percy, Thomas. 1839. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs … of Our Earlier Poets (etc.). London: Templeman.
Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Clarendon.
Sargent, Helen Child, and George Lyman Kittredge, eds. 1904. English and Scottish Popular Ballads: Edited from the Collection of Francis James Child. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.