Artist: John Hammond
Author: traditional
Label: Gennett
Year: 1925

As Purty Polly (also on Challenge, Silvertone & Champion under pseudonyms Levi Stanley and Abe Morris). Different John Hammond than the famous Columbia producer or his son. Dreadful murder ballad with roots in an English broadside ballad from around 1750 and even with passages in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Related to Lady Isabel And The Elf Knight (see also: Outlandish Knight) and in America with the Knoxville Girl and Rose Connelly. According to a popular Blue Ridge Mountain folk tale, Pretty Polly was lured into the woods by three young men to be murdered. Thanks to a speaking parrot and a grim discovery (a woman's hand), she kept the men at bay while witnessing another murder, which in the end cost them their heads instead of her's. Oldest American publication: in a Kentucky folksong collection from 1916. Other early broadside title: The Gosport Tragedy, about Molly from Gosport and her suitor William, who kills her before sailing off from Portsmouth harbor aboard the Bedford, where he's haunted by grief and hallucinations.

Woody Guthrie's Pastures Of Plenty and Bob Dylan's Ballad Of Hollis Brown share similar elements. (see also: Poor Man and Po' Lazarus)