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The same moralizing with regard to responsibility to family--no longer cOlllll1unity··life,
shows in criminals and outlaws telling the siory of their moral degradation as a "counter­
exemplum" for their time:
My father in his winding sheet, my mother she does appear,
The girl I love sitting by her side a-wiping off her tears,
For broken-heaned they all died but now too late I find,
For God had seen my cruelty for the girl I left behind. l
The "missionary zeal" of Protestant evangelism over Newfoundland, which Peacok sees
renected in song, does not even spare innocent lovers:
This poor girl she died heart-broken,
And the sailor fell from his work at sea,
And for their sins they will have to answer
Before their Maker on the Judgment Day.2
As well as their expressive fonn, the concerns voiced by lyrical songs reneet the new
concentration of affection on family. Parents in broadsides mostly appeared to the effect of
murdering their daughter's lover and sequesrrating her without scruple. In later pieces.
these invetemte and undefeatable villains amazingly tum to weakened and pitiful creatures
pining away in the absence of their "only" soldier boy or "lovely" daughter:
'Twas early the next morning as brilliant rose the sun,
A man brought home the body of poor young Harry Dunn,
And wher, his mother saw him she fell down on the ground,
For it was the boy she loved so dear, her soul was heavenward bound.
As for his dear old father, he lingered for a while,
But ever since hereafter was never known to smile,
In less Ihan six weeks after they buried the poor old man,
And now you can see the deathly curse on the woods of Michigan.:!
He put her into the sleigh again and with her he drove home
Umilthey reached her father's cot; oh how these parents mourned!
They mourned for the loss of their only child, young Charlie wept over his doom,
And alas, he died with a broken hean and they slumbered in one tomb. 4
The clash between the old allegiance to community (or nation) and family affection is
made nowhere more explicit than by this martyr of the revolution of sentiment:
IPeacock. Songs 2: 450, SI. 6.
2Pcacock. Songs 3: 721, st. 14.
3 Peacock, Songs 3: 764. $1. 8-9.
4Peacock. Songs 3: 736, SI. 11.