Sally Monroe
Come all ye young females, I pray you'll attend
To these twa or three letters that I've newly penned,
To let you understand the hardships I undergo,
When first I fell in love wi' young Sally Monroe.
I wrote her a letter, a letter I did send;
I sent it with a comrade I thought to be a friend.
Instead of bein' a friend to me, he proved to be a for,
And he never gave that letter to young Sally Monroe.
It was on a Sunday morning about six o'clock,
'Twas all in a sudden our ship did strike a rock.
Three hundred and fifty were all sank below,
And out among that number I lost Sally Monroe.
'Twas from her aged parents I stole her away,
And that will grieve my conscience till my dying day.
It was not for to injure her that I did do so,
And all my life I'll mou-rn for young Sally Monroe!
Source: Doerflinger, via Samuel P. Bayard (1940)
Doerflinger’s (Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman) source for this song is Samuel P. Bayard, 1940, who collected the song from Mary Grieve, who learned it in Scotland. It was also recorded in Newfoundland around the same time, having appeared as a fragment mingled with “The Gosport Tragedy” in Greenleaf and Mansfield’s Ballads and Seasongs of Newfoundland (1933).