Barb'ry Ellen: A Song History

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The ballad goes back at least to 1666: Samuel Pepys's diary for 2 January 1666 records a gathering at Lord Brouncker's where he sang with Mrs. Knipp and especially enjoyed "her little Scotch song of 'Barbary Allen'".^[1] Knipp (Elizabeth Knepp) was an actress, singer and dancer with the King's Company.^[2] Folklorists file the ballad as Child 84 and Roud 54, and its plot is much the same in most versions, though details vary: a young man dies for love of Barbara, who has spurned him, and she dies of remorse soon after, with a rose and a briar growing from their graves and twining together.^[3][2] The English Broadside Ballad Archive holds a broadside called "Barbara Allen's Cruelty: or, The Young-man's Tragedy," tentatively dated 1675–1696, while the Traditional Ballad Index gives 1740, in Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, as its earliest date for a text, so sources differ on when it first reached print.^[4][3][2]

It has been collected very widely: the Ballad Index reports it from every region of the United States, from Canada, Britain and Ireland, and counts 198 versions in Bertrand Bronson's collection, plus two more in its addenda.^[3] Writing for the Library of Congress, folklorist John Fenn places it among the ballads that field collectors have gathered most often, and in 1966 the Library issued a whole LP, Versions and Variants of the Tunes of Barbara Allen (AFS L54), built from 30 recordings that Charles Seeger chose from its Archive of Folk Song.^[5] Among the Library's holdings is a 1936 recording of Rebecca Tarwater of Rockwood, Tennessee, made by Seeger in Washington and later issued on the Library's album Anglo-American Ballads (AFS L1).^[6] In the Southern Appalachians, Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917) printed the ballad with versions from Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, noted between 1907 and 1916.^[7] In one of them, sung by Ada B. Smith in Knott County, Kentucky, in December 1907, the heroine is named Barbara Ellen, contracted to Barb'ra Ellen in the words printed under the music.^[7]

By the late 1920s it was on commercial records: Bradley Kincaid, singing with his own guitar, recorded "Barbara Allen" for Gennett in Chicago on February 25, 1928, and it came out on the Silvertone and Supertone labels.^[8] The Kentucky singer and dulcimer player Jean Ritchie, who grew up with her father's dulcimer on the mantel in Viper, put "Barbara Allen" on her 1960 Folkways album British Traditional Ballads (Child Ballads) in the Southern Mountains, Vol. 1.^[9][10] Notes for that album, quoted on Mainly Norfolk, say the Ritchie family sang the ballad to two different tunes.^[2] Shortened forms of the name, like the one used here, turn up among singers too: Mainly Norfolk lists June Tabor's "Barbry Ellen" (2001), credited to the Ritchie family's singing, and "Barb'ry Ellen" by Mary Humphreys and Anahata (2003), set to a tune Sharp noted in Somerset in 1903.^[2]

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Sources

1. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: "Tuesday 2 January 1665/66".
2. Mainly Norfolk: "Barbara Allen / Barbary Allen / Barbary Ellen (Roud 54; Child 84; G/D 6:1193; Henry H236)".
3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Bonny Barbara Allan [Child 84]".
4. English Broadside Ballad Archive (UC Santa Barbara): "Barbara Allen's Cruelty: or, The Young-man's Tragedy" (EBBA 30145).
5. Library of Congress, Folklife Today (John Fenn): "Song of the Week: Barbara Allen".
6. Library of Congress: "Barbara Allen" (Rebecca Tarwater, recorded by Charles Seeger, 1936).
7. Internet Archive: Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, "English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians" (1917).
8. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Gennett matrix 13472. Barbara Allen / Bradley Kincaid".
9. Smithsonian Folkways: "British Traditional Ballads (Child Ballads) in the Southern Mountains, Vol. 1" (Jean Ritchie).
10. National Endowment for the Arts: "Jean Ritchie".