This song was collected in the Asheville area of North Carolina and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia around 1930 by Dorothy Scarborough. She included it in her book A Song Catcher in Southern Mountains, American Folk Songs of British Ancestry.
This is an excerpt from her text: Mrs. Stikeleather also sang it (Pretty Saro) into my dictaphone and contributed it to this collection. She told me that while the date 'eighteen forty-nine' is used in some of the versions of the song, 'seventeen forty-nine' is more probably correct, as that year witnessed considerable immigration to North Carolina from Ireland, and Scotland, and this old English song was no doubt adapted to its new setting at that time.
Scarborough later says that the use of the phrase "free-holder" indicates the song is of British origin.
As I was recording this my wife Camilla came into the studio and asked if I had noticed the resemblance in melody to a song that she and I had written together , Making Movies. I hadn't noticed it , but did as soon as she brought it to my attention. She had never heard Pretty Saro and had come up with the melody for Making Movies. Perhaps it was a genetic memory from her Scottish ancestry.
The purpose of the Folk Den is to use the medium of the World Wide Web to continue the tradition of the folk process, that is the telling of stories, and singing of songs, passed on from one generation to another, by word of mouth.
In this electronic era, such a process is in danger of being overwhelmed by the commercial mass media. This page and others on the 'net are working to preserve the folk songs that have chronicled our global heritage for centuries.
In the Folk Den, a "new" folk song is uploaded every month as a "Global Community Service."
