Marybird McAllister  

Of Marybird McAllister's one hundred and sixty some odd songs remembered, this must have been her favorite. I cannot remember a visit with song swapping or a recording session that did not include a rendition of this song, or at least her inquiry, "Did I sing you the one about 'One morning in May I heard a married man to a young girl say'?" It was a song that seemed to be always in her mind, and while other songs might fade or become garbled in her memory "Across the Blue Mountain" was always there strong and clear.

After hearing Marybird sing the song several times I began to inquire of her nearest neighbors if they too knew and sang the song. They all stated that they had heard Marybird sing it but that they did not sing it nor did they know anyone else who did. Since she seemed to be the only one who knew the song and since it so closely paralleled an event from her own life (her husband, Lem, deserted her and left Brown's Cove to 'cross the Blue Mountain' with a young girl only to return to Marybird seven years later) we began to suspect that she had made the song herself. For several years all inquiries about the song were fruitless. It failed to appear in searches through books of folksongs from the area. Then one day on my first trip in to Bacon Hollow I found three singers who knew and sang the song, David Morris, Florence Shiflett and her cousin Effie Shiflett Morris. Curiously their versions included an expansion of the story as in these additional stanzas:

She traveled, she traveled till she became lame
She turned back home and she thought it was a shame
Living with a Dutchman he thought me to maintain
And if I were back with my kin I would never come here again

He left me, he left me, he left me alone
He left me no house nor no money nor no home
He left me no friend nor no relation a'nigh
And when I think of my Mother I sit down and cry

Later searches turned up another version in the manuscript archives of the University of Virginia. This one from the Buena Vista also contained the 'Dutchman' references and the moralistic ending.

So the song with its local references, Blue Mountain(s), Allegheny and the German settlers so prevalent in the Shenandoah Valley, was probably made by some folk artist from the general region within the past hundred or one hundred fifty years and cast to the lovely, simple tune which is stylistically just like those songs of a much older vintage.

"Across the Blue Mountain," then, is not Marybird's song except by adoption and association. Yet her version, a simple love song without pietizing, penalty and remorse, is so much more gracious and appealing that it still seems to be her own.

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