BARBARA ALLEN
Created on 03/11/2005Latest update on 20/12/2025
Artist: Mrs Knipp
Author: traditional
Label: His Master's Voice
Year: 1666
Actress in the company of king Charles II, known among Samuel Pepys' tavern friends as 'the Red-breasted Warbler'. In his famous diary Pepys wrote on January 2, 1666 how delighted he was to hear Mrs Knipp sing het little Scotch song of Barbary Allen. Later that same day he noted he 'got into the coach where Mrs. Knipp was and got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung, and at last set her at her house and so good night.'
Covers:
- 1910s:
Dame Clara Butt [for His Master's Voice; became the Vera Lynn of WW I]
- 1927:
- 1930:
- 1933:
John Jacob Niles [as The Ballad Of Barberry Allen]
- 1933:
Moses Platt [Lomax recording]
- 1936:
Rebecca Tarwater [Charles Seeger recording]
- 1940:
Rebecca King Jones [Anne & Frank Warner recording]
- 1941:
- 1941:
Texas Gladden [Lomax recording]
- 1946:
- 1947:
- 1949:
- 1951:
- 1951:
- 1953:
Sarah Makem [Tommy Makem's mother]
- 1954:
- 1958:
- 1959:
- 1959:
- 1961:
- 1961:
Jean Ritchie [a cappella]
- 1962:
Bob Dylan [8 minute version on Live At The Gaslight; "Without Barbara Allen there'd be no Girl From The North Country"]
- 1963:
- 1966:
- 1967:
- 1973:
- 1976:
- 1988:
- 1994:
- 2000:
- 2000:
- 2001:
Emmy Rossum [in film Songcatcher]
- 2001:
Emmylou Harris [idem]
- 2001:
- 2004:
John Travolta [in film A Love Song For Bobby Long]
- 2005:
Mary Humphreys & Anahata [as Barbrie Ellen; lyrics copied from a 1923 version by William Pittaway from Oxfordshire, collected by Cecil Sharp; on CD Song Links 2]
- 2005:
Cassie Franklin & Southern Brew [American version on CD Song Links 2]
- 2008:
- 2011:
- 2013:
Same king Charles II had an affair with a Barbara Villiers. Abraham Lincoln sang it as a child. Song #84 in the Child collection, Roud #54. Model for the ballad form in secondary schools in England and the US. "Hard-hearted Barbara Allen" who prudely kept her lover at bay as long as she lived, was buried right next of her "sweet William". A rose and a briar grew out of each of their bosoms and what seemed impossible during both of their lifetimes was accomplished post mortem: they got entwined in a true love's knot. But what this song really advocates is "thou shalt not have pleasure", the dominant puritan ethic controlling pious pioneer girls and women.
