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Lone Green Valley/Jealous Lover vs Pretty Polly

mduval32323

Certified Contributor II
Posts: 965

mduval32323 @ 2020-09-17 16:34:40 UTC

I had recently set up this Work on SHS Lone Green Valley / The Jealous Lover / Cruel Knife which Vernon Dalhart recorded

Today I was setting up another old British traditional called The Cruel Ship's Captain / The Captain's Apprentice and while doing so ran across The Cruel Ship's Carpenter, which I quickly discovered was just a variant of Pretty Polly and they both deal with a jealous lover luring his girl down into the forest (or fields or valleys) and plunging a knife in her and killing her. I will start adding some Cruel Ship's Carpenter songs to Pretty Polly as we don't currently have any.

Pretty Polly

Anyway, back to why I'm posting this. It appears to me that Work I had set up for Lone Green Valley / Jealous Lover...is really just telling a simplified version of the same tale.

Here's a link of the lyrics to one version of Lone Green Valley

http://www.bobdylanroots.com/lonegree.html

So for the time being I set up the newer Work I had created as an adaptation of Pretty Polly just so they are linked in some fashion. But since we have such a broad range of floating lyrics in most traditionals anyway, I'm wondering if I should delete the Work I created and merge them with the Pretty Polly family.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thx Mark

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Mark

mduval32323

Certified Contributor II
Posts: 965

mduval32323 @ 2020-09-17 16:39:35 UTC

I've also noticed I sure seem to run into a lot of these old-time songs that involve the male being named "Willie"

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Mark

SlimD

Retired Editor
Posts: 1377

SlimD @ 2020-09-17 19:43:06 UTC

Mark,

I'll take a look to see if I can help.

Just one quick comment. I wasn't previously aware of how similar Woody Guthrie's "Reno Blues" (Philadelphia Lawyer) was to Dalhart's "Lone Green Valley." Not only is the music almost identical but Guthrie also borrowed lyrics.

Thanks for adding this.

mduval32323

Certified Contributor II
Posts: 965

mduval32323 @ 2020-09-17 22:05:03 UTC

This stuff becomes so complicated as so many of these songs borrow from one another. Ugh.

I actually bought the Woody Guthrie Asch box set and have all the liner notes to each volume in my car as I had intended to go through every song. I just took pictures of the page on Philadelphia Lawyer and emailed them to you Murray. It indeed says Woody apparently set his words to the traditional American ballad "Jealous Lover". I alone have been doing this but I have been naming traditionals with many variants multi-titled to reflect this (e.g., Lone Green Valley / Jealous Lover). Mainly Norfolk does this (but they didn't have these as I guess they were only American). Maybe I shouldn't merge these songs with Pretty Polly then and leave it as is if the musical portion is unique (plus we certainly don't want to say Philadelphia Lawyer is an adaptation of Pretty Polly)

I had bought this for these liner notes as I want to get Woody's discography sorted out at some point so we can get the "real" credits on SHS. His discography is tough.

Last edit: 2020-09-17 22:10:29 UTC by mduval32323

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Mark