Butcher Boy: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"The Butcher Boy" is a song of abandonment rather than murder: a young woman, deserted by the butcher's lad who courted her, takes her own life, leaving a note asking that her grave show she died for love, and her father finds her.[1] Folklorists file it as Laws P24 and Roud 409, and it has been found across England, the United States, Canada and Australia.[1] Its exact source is unsettled. The earliest dated text in the Traditional Ballad Index is a broadside printed before 1865, and the Index notes that most scholars see the song as two older ones joined together, while Leach thought it a single song of American origin.[1] Rod Stradling's notes trace it to at least three British broadsides, among them "Sheffield Park," and other commentators place it in a family of songs built largely from floating verses.[2] In the United States it was sold as a stall ballad in Boston and New York and printed in early songsters.[2]

Etching of an old London street lined with gabled houses and butchers’ shop fronts

Joseph Pennell, Butcher’s Row, Whitechapel, print, 1904. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Kelly Harrell recorded "Butcher's Boy" for Victor in 1925 (Victor 19563) and cut it again the following year, and Henry Whitter also recorded it for OKeh in 1925.[1][3] Vernon Dalhart followed in 1927.[1] The best-known early recording is Buell Kazee's "The Butcher's Boy (The Railroad Boy)," made for Brunswick on January 16, 1928.[1][4] The Blue Sky Boys recorded the song for Bluebird in 1940.[1] In 1952 Harry Smith put Kazee's side on the Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways), where it reached a new audience.[2][4]

Sing Out! calls the Kazee version "part of the bedrock of the Folk Revival."[4] Peggy Seeger recorded it in the mid-1950s, Frank Proffitt in 1962, and Jean Ritchie sang it with Doc Watson as "Go Dig My Grave" on their 1963 Folk City album.[2] Almeda Riddle recorded it in 1972, and it remains in circulation today; the band Lankum recorded "Go Dig My Grave" in 2023.[2]

Find books with Butcher Boy for sale →

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Butcher Boy [Laws P24]".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Butcher Boy (Roud 409; Laws P24)".
  3. UC Santa Barbara Library: "1925 Recordings Digitized by UCSB Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2026".
  4. Sing Out!: "The Butcher Boy / The Railroad Boy" (Patrick Blackman, Murder Ballad Monday).