Yellow Handkerchief, The (Flash Company)

DESCRIPTION: Singer once loved a young girl who wore a yellow handkerchief. Unfortunately, he kept "flash company", and he is now ruined and destitute; "Like a flower in the garden all my color has gone."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1906 (Gardiner coll.)
KEYWORDS: disease love clothes lover floatingverses
FOUND IN: Britain(England(Lond,South,West))
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Gardham-EarliestVersions, "FLASH COMPANY"
Kennedy-FolksongsOfBritainAndIreland 360, "The Yellow Handkerchief" (1 text, 1 tune)
MacColl/Seeger-TravellersSongsFromEnglandAndScotland 32, "The Yellow Handkerchief" (1 text, 1 tune); also 58, "The False-Hearted Lover" (1 text, 1 tune)
Palmer-FolkSongsCollectedBy-Ralph-VaughanWilliams, #47, "The Myrtle Tree" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud/Bishop-NewPenguinBookOfEnglishFolkSongs #80, "Flash Company" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, FLASHCMP* (FALSHART*)
ADDITIONAL: Hugh Anderson, _Farewell to Judges and Juries: The Broadside Ballad and Convict Transportation to Australia, 1788-1868_, Red Rooster Press, 2000, p. 13, "Flash Company" (1 text, with a tune on p. 534)
Roud #954
RECORDINGS:
Phoebe Smith, "Yellow Handkerchief" (on Voice11)
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Harding B 11(4190), "Flash Company" ("First I loved William, and then I loved John"), Thomas Smith (?), n.d
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Oh, No, Not I" (floating lyrics)
cf. "Green Grows the Laurel (Green Grow the Lilacs)" (floating lyrics)
NOTES [100 words]: MacColl and Seeger, for some inexplicable reason, identify their fragment-of-a-fragment with Laws O 37 ("Mary on the Silvery Tide"). Their version is clearly not a unity, but since it has the chorus and form of this song (and the other bits and pieces are too small to identify), here it files.
Including their text "The False-Hearted Lover" is even more of a stretch, but it consists of one verse certainly from this song, one that seems unique, and four floaters; where else do you file it? This point is discussed in some detail in the notes to Roud/Bishop-NewPenguinBookOfEnglishFolkSongs. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: K360

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