Little Girl That Played Upon My Knee, The

DESCRIPTION: Singer is going home after many years. He left father, mother, brother, and little sister Jenny. Does she remember "many hours of pleasure" playing upon his knee? He is weary of life and wishes to be buried next to her.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1937 (recording, Carter Family)
KEYWORDS: homesickness home rambling return reunion separation travel burial death lament nonballad family sister
FOUND IN: US(MA)
Roud #15118
RECORDINGS:
Charles S. Brink, "I'm Homeward Bound" (on in BayardCollection, video 06 ("Charles S. Brink #8" starting at 03.15))
Carter Family, "The Little Girl That Played On My Knee" (Decca 5677, 1937)
Abner Boggs, "The Years Have Passed and Gone Away" (The Lomax Kentucky Recordings @ https://lomaxky.omeka.net/items/show/570 (1937))
NOTES [184 words]: The description follows the Carter Family recording. None of the entries for Roud #15118 in Steve Roud's Folk Somg Index version 127 (2024) are earlier than 1937. In fact, the Abner Boggs recording, earliest Montreal Family Herald & Weekly Star reference, as well as the Carter Family recording, are all from 1937.
The authors of Folk Songs of the Catskills (1982) -- Norman Cazden, Herbert Haufrecht, Norman Studer -- include "The Little Girl that Played upon My Knee" among the songs "which we feel it needless to present.... They contain nothing, either in substance or in form, that would justify the space needed to print them, or that is not well duplicated in the examples given here. Still, we ought to take note of a refreshing aspect to those songs, namely, their share and their function in a more comprehensive repertory. They were performed for us by the same singers, and with the same interest on the part of those singers, as any of the songs in this volume. They formed as much a part of a living musical tradition as any we might incline to judge superior in merit" (p. 382). - BS
Last updated in version 7.1
File: BCSBLGPK

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