She's Gone to be a Mormonite

DESCRIPTION: "I'll tell you what I'm going to do And that without delay, I'll pack my trunk and I'll be off, I'll go this very day." The singer tells of a girl who's "Gone to be a Mormonite In the new Jerusalem." (He?) knows not where she is, except that she's Mormon
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1941 (Randolph)
KEYWORDS: separation travel marriage religious
FOUND IN: US(Ro,So)
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Randolph 501, "She's Gone to be a Mormonite" (1 text)
Hubbard-BalladsAndSongsFromUtah, #221, "My Wife Has Become a Mormonite" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, pp. 218-219, "My Wife Has Become a Mormonite" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #7640
NOTES [158 words]: Although I have no direct evidence of it, I suspect -- both for psychological reasons (why would a *girl* want to be a Mormon?) and the strange constructions in Randolph's text of the song -- that it was a man who was originally referred to in it. (In Hubbard-BalladsAndSongsFromUtah's version, the singer misses his wife, who has vanished, probably to become a Mormon, and has taken his furniture.) How it came to refer to a woman I do not know.
To be fair, there was a legend that said that Mormon men were particularly sexually proficient (see the notes to "The Mormon Cowboy" in Logdson's The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing), and Fawn M. Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History (1945, 1971; I use the 1995 Vintage Books edition), p. xii, notes that Smith had some fifty wives in his life, most of them voluntary -- and that over 200 wives "married" him after his death. (Of course, they were safe from him when dead.) - RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: R501

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