Maid A-Being Young, A

DESCRIPTION: "Well, a maid a being young, she thought it no harm (x3), so she jumped in the bed and rolled in my arms." "And it’s what I done there I cannot tell here." She becomes pregnant. The singer says to hire a nurse for a girl or to name a boy after him
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1968 (notebook contributed to Southern Appalachian Archives/Mars Hill University; apparently copied 1960 and learned at least four decades earlier)
KEYWORDS: love courting pregnancy derivative
FOUND IN: US(SE)
RECORDINGS:
Bobby McMillon, "A Maid A-Being Young" (Piotr-Archive #85, recorded 11/04/2021)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Rosemary Lane" [Laws K43] (plot, lyrics)
NOTES [92 words]: This is so close in plot, and even in the lyrics, to "Rosemary Lane" [Laws K43] that I seriously considered filing it with that song. Clearly it is a rewrite. The question is whether it was a deliberate rewrite for comic effect or a case of someone barely remembering a "Rosemary Lane" version and reconstructing it with a lot of errors; I would guess the latter, but I'm not sure. It seems to have had very limited circulation among relatives of Bobby McMillon (the Southern Appalachian Archives manuscript copy is in the McMillon collection there). - RBW
Last updated in version 6.7
File: RcAMABY

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