Grayson & Whitter - Rose Conley (1927)

October 18, 1927

Recorded in Atlanta, Georgia

G. B. Grayson (a blind musician) is on fiddle

Henry Whitter is on guitar

Grayson sings

"Rose Connolly" is an Appalachian murder ballad about a man of a higher class than Rose, who became pregnant. His father did not want him to marry beneath his class and encouraged him to kill Rose since he thought that his money and position would buy the boy out of trouble. The ballad was modified and given the title "Rose Conley" (different spelling) when it was recorded for the Victor company.

I say "Appalachian murder ballad" since the song was popular in the Appalachian part of the United States, but the song was penned in Ireland in the early 19th century and made its way to America through immigrants. It seems the song “Rose Connolly” can be traced to Coleraine, Northern Ireland, as early as 1811.

It is told from a murderer's perspective of his poisoning and stabbing his pregnant girlfriend.

Down in the willow garden, where me and my love did meet,
oh, there we sit a-courting. My love dropped off to sleep.

I had a bottle of the burg'lar's wine, which my true
love did not know, and there I poisoned my own
true love down under the banks below.

Poor woman

I drew my sabre through her, which was a bloody knife.
I threw her in the river, which was a dreadful sight.
My father always taught me that money would set me free if
I'd murder that pretty little miss whose name is Rose Connolly.

NOW FOR LYRICS NOT INCLUDED IN THE RECORDED VERSION MADE FOR VICTOR:

He's sitting now in his own cottage door, a-wiping his weeping eyes.
A-looking at his own dear son upon the scaffold high.
My race is run beneath the sun. Low hell is now waiting for me.
I did murder that pretty little miss whose name is Rose Connolly.
____________________

The burglar's or burgalar's wine is puzzling. A mishearing of burgundy?

More likely, a burglar's wine is slang for drugged wine. In old days, travelers would stay at roadside inns at night. Crooked inn keepers would dope wine to give to them so that when they went to sleep it would be easy to steal their valuables. To "poison" someone did not necessarily mean to kill them.

The blind fiddler Grayson is a country music legend. He was tragically killed on August 16, 1930, while riding on the running boards of a vehicle outside of Damascus, Virginia.

Henry Whitter was born on April 6, 1892.

He was a pioneer in what would eventually be called "hillbilly" and much later "country" music. The June 1924 issue of Talking Machine World actually calls it "Hill Country Music."

Edison literature of early 1926 used the term "Mountaineer and Rural Ballads."

Whitter had sessions within a year of Arkansas-born fiddler A. C. ("Eck") Robertson, who had cut in mid-1922 for the Victor Talking Machine Company such instrumental numbers as "Arkansaw Traveler," "Sallie Gooden," and "Done Gone" (on two early selections Robertson is joined by fiddler Henry C. Gilliland).