Who writes “The Ballad of Nancy and Henry”?
Harry Smith’s Anthology incorporated his somewhat idiosyncratic, news-brief style summaries for the songs he included. The brief on “Ommie Wise” reads as follows:
GREEDY GIRL GOES TO ADAMS SPRING WITH LIAR; LIVES JUST LONG ENOUGH TO REGRET IT
A Naomi Wise was drowned by her sweetheart Jonathan Lewis in Deep River, 1808 and her grave can still be seen nearby at Providence Church, North Carolina. These are probably the same ‘Omie’ and John Lewis mentioned in the ballad. The combination of voice and violin (played by the singer) is quite archaic.
G.B. Grayson’s version (from Smith’s Anthology) is here:
The lyrics for this version are here.
As I’ve said earlier, I’m less interested in discussing the dynamics of the actual story than in understanding how such stories represent starting points for people to create meaning through song. Discussing what really happened and why is different for me in “Omie Wise,” than is discussing what “really” happens and why in “Fair Ellender.”
However tongue-in-cheek Smith might be in this summary, calling Naomi “greedy” seems a bit unfair. Whether in the song, or in the actual case on which it’s based, it’s pretty clear that she was playing a fairly limited hand. But, Smith calls her “greedy,” and Wallin’s version calls her “fool-like.” Somehow the song will not let her become the completely innocent victim of Lewis’s betrayal.
It’s probably unavoidable in parsing this out that the facts of the real case matter. An excellent blog discussion of those facts can be found here.
The historical records indicate that the real Naomi Wise had two children, Nancy and Henry, for whom Naomi had filed papers requiring their fathers to pay a Bastardy Bond, ensuring that the children would not become a burden on the county. It even appears that this historical record was deliberately hidden for a time, because someone disapproved of the facts.
Nevertheless, it is fairly clear that this detail of the real Naomi’s circumstances escaped the explicit concern of the songwriters and singers. Although the song concedes the pregnancy, it does not mention the older children. This may be a move in the direction of turning this tale, through song, into a warning—ignoring the details that marriage, even if it was a real possibility for the real Naomi, was a more complicated situation. This makes Omie more tragic, perhaps. I’m not sure what it does for Lewis’s villainy.
It will probably serve us well, in discussing a genre where the burden of violence falls disproportionately on women, to be attentive to the characterizations of the female protagonists. In the real case, Naomi’s death represents a tragedy for her older children as well, compounding her murderer’s villainy. In the song, however, perhaps because the song may serve as a cautionary tale, it’s left out. There’s more to this than I can get into at the moment, and I can’t do it justice in a single post, but expect this dynamic of how these songs figure in the ongoing development of understandings of morality and gender, will be a subject we return to again and again.
There is enough mystery and controversy about the facts of the actual case that a number people have put thought to the “rest of the story.” That is, they take the skeleton of the song, and fill in the details around it, with parts imagined or cobbled together from fragments of the history and the legend. One example is Anna Domino’s retelling, in Naomi’s voice, of the circumstances leading up to her fateful meeting (found in The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad). In my next post, I’ll discuss one songwriter’s attempt to tell the rest of Lewis’s story.
I wonder, however, if anybody has attempted to write a “Ballad of Nancy and Henry.”
