Willie's Fatal Visit

Willie's Fatal Visit is Child ballad 255.[1]

Synopsis

A woman asks after her mother, her father, her brother John, and her true love Willie. Only Willie was nearby. He came to her at night, and she took him to bed, telling the cock not to crow until daylight. It crows earlier, and she takes the moonlight for dawn. Willie goes. He meets a ghost along the way. By a church, she tells him that he traveled in sin and said no prayers; then she kills him, tearing his body asunder.

Origins

A version of this ballad was published in Peter Buchan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland.[2][3] Francis James Child believed that the first part of the ballad was a medley of Sweet William's Ghost (Child ballad 77), Clerk Saunders (Child ballad 69) and The Grey Cock (Child ballad 248).[2]

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gollark: If you're using spacewarp storage or digitally serialized particles or whatever, you're still *storing* them somewhere.
gollark: As they are "saved for later use", this obviously means they are stored somewhere (a "facility", if you will) from whence they can be deployed.
gollark: No, I mean upon their departure from your facilities.
gollark: I'm not ignoring them. Upon their departure, we substituted them for GTech™ apiodrones which act identically to an external observer.

See also

References
  1. Francis James Child (1898). English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
  2. James Porter (1995). Jeannie Robertson - Emergent Singer Transformative Voice. Knoxville, Tennessee, USA: University of Tennessee Press. p. 252. ISBN 9780870499043. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
  3. Buchan, Peter (1875). Ancient ballads and songs of the north of Scotland hitherto unpublished. Volume 2 (reprint ed.). W Paterson. p. 247. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
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