Pretty Polly: A Song History
"Pretty Polly" is the American offshoot of an English broadside ballad, and the Traditional Ballad Index, which numbers that parent ballad Laws P36 and Roud 15, treats "Pretty Polly" as a heavily reduced form of it.[1] The parent song, "The Gosport Tragedy," tells of a ship's carpenter who kills the young woman he has made pregnant, flees to sea, and is exposed when her ghost follows him; a study by Brooks, summarized in the Index, traces its ancestry to a broadside printed in 1720.[1] The much shorter American form drops the ghost: Polly agrees to a ride with Willie ahead of their marriage and is killed beside a grave already dug for her.[2] The Index says there is no sharp line between the long and short versions, and it separates them chiefly by whether the ghost appears.[1] It also reports one account, from a West Virginia source, that tied the song to the early-nineteenth-century murder of a Polly Aldridge, whose killer was said to have been executed in Martin County, Kentucky; the ballad's English pedigree is older still.[2]
Reinier Nooms, called Zeeman, Men Caulking the Hull of a Ship, etching, 17th century. Shipwrights at work on a hull, shown for the ship's carpenter of the parent ballad; it has no connection to the song.
The short form's earliest dated text in the Index is from 1856, in Thompson's A Pioneer Songster, and collectors later found it across Appalachia, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the Rockies and Canada.[2] Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians prints 21 texts under the title "The Cruel Ship's Carpenter," though the Index notes that many are fragments that could just as well be counted as "Pretty Polly."[1] The year 1927 brought several commercial recordings, among them Dock Boggs on Brunswick and B. F. Shelton on Victor.[2] Shelton, singing to his own banjo, cut his version in Bristol, Tennessee, on July 29, 1927, at a session overseen by Ralph Peer.[3]
Later recordings listed by the Index include the Coon Creek Girls, whose version was recorded in 1938, Pete Steele that same year, and the Stanley Brothers on Columbia in 1951.[2] Steve Eulberg includes it, in D-F-A-D tuning, in Dulci-Bro: Method And Resources For Playing Resonator Dulcimer, an 80-page Fingers Of Steel method book with CD that teaches notes, scales and slide technique on a four-equidistant-string resonator dulcimer.[4]
Sources
- Traditional Ballad Index: "Cruel Ship's Carpenter, The (The Gosport Tragedy; Pretty Polly)".
- Traditional Ballad Index: "Pretty Polly (II)".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix CVE-39736. Pretty Polly / B. F. Shelton".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Steve Eulberg, Dulci-Bro: Method And Resources For Playing Resonator Dulcimer".
- Image: Reinier Nooms, called Zeeman, Men Caulking the Hull of a Ship, etching, 17th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.