Arts
The song in this story----Wildwood Flower----is now a traditional “folk song,” but was composed as parlor music by J. P. Webster, living in Elkhorn, Wisconsin at the time, shortly before the Civil War. The original lyrics by Maud Irving were so strange that most renditions of the song make mondegreen of them. Take, for example, the first stanza. Maud wrote: I’ll twine 'mid the ringlets of my raven black hair,The lilies so pale and the roses so fair,The myrtle so bright with an emerald hue,And the pale aronatus with eyes of bright blue.But the usual version given, is that which is sung here by Maybelle Carter in 1928:Oh, I'll twine with my mingles and waving black hair,With the roses so red and the lilies so fair,And the myrtle so bright with the emerald dew,The pale and the leader and eyes look like blue.Actually, neither one makes much sense. But there is no flower called “aronatus;” what Maud meant by that is anybody’s guess.