You would have your own idea of what the characters looked like, of the graveyard, of the rose and the briar.
If you were listening to this story, or any other ballad, by firelight, sung (most likely) by your mother or grandmother (since women were the primary carriers of songs before the twentieth century), with no instrument to accompany her voice, you would be swept up in your own imagination of the story. Hmph… reason enough to make a man die, right? There was that incident in the tavern when Sweet William drank a toast to “the ladies all” but excluded Barbry. There are, it should be said, many other verses that could have been included and sometimes are, if the singer to a modern audience is not afraid of putting them all to sleep. Like many a good short story, we aren’t told precisely what happened before the events, only what happened afterwards. Oh, sad sad, the story of thwarted love and death. They grew and grew in the old church yard They buried Barbry in the old church yard No ballad probably has more purchase, more claim to the name, than the doleful tale of Barbry (or Barbara) Allen (or Ellen): What is a folk ballad? Broadly categorized as murder stories and romances, they were tales of love lost, lost love revenged, and death as retribution or simply, as a sorrowful end to the story. So the ballads changed and grew with their carriers. And if memory failed at a certain verse, new words and ideas could fill the gap. In transmitting songs, particularly the ballads (basically, story-songs) from the old country, they were making an innate statement of their heritage, their homelands, their morals and their aspirations. Two hundred or more years before the invention of television, when “common” people were not encouraged, or, in some cases, even allowed to read what few newspapers existed, the oral tradition of singing and storytelling comprised a major part of a family’s entertainment and information. One thing they brought-from Ireland, Scotland, and England-was their music. So they brought what they needed with them, left the outside world as far behind as possible, and asked for little from it. And being the kind of people they were, they wanted no outside influences creeping in. But people did homestead there (See “Homesteading in Appalachia”, by Karyn Sweet). The hills are steep with a tall tree every couple feet, and in between, rocks, brush, brambles, and pine needles.
If you’ve ever traveled through the southern Appalachian Mountains, you will immediately understand, even from the window of your car, that it would have been mighty hard to establish a homestead there.
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