“Fair and Tender Ladies” (Roud 451), also called “Little Sparrow,” “Tiny Sparrow” and “Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies,” is a lament in which a woman warns other women about the falseness of men. The earliest dated texts in the standard collections are from Missouri, where versions were collected in 1904 and 1906 for Henry Marvin Belden’s Missouri Folklore Society volume, and John Jacob Niles collected another in 1912. Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles printed eighteen texts and tunes from the southern Appalachians, and the Traditional Ballad Index lists versions from Appalachia, the Midwest, the Southeast and the wider South. Only a couple of British texts are known, from Scotland, and the Index’s editor concludes that the song more likely travelled from America to Britain than the reverse.
The lyric warns the “fair and tender ladies” to take care how they court, because men are like a star on a summer morning, who appear and are gone: they tell a loving story, then court someone else and leave the woman in grief. In a verse the singer wishes herself on a tall mountain, from which she would write a letter to her false true love. The closing verses say that love is pretty while it is new and fades like the morning dew as it grows old. In the Index’s summary of the traditional song, the woman also wishes she were a little sparrow with wings, so that she could fly to her true love.
Jean Ritchie, who learned her version from her uncle Jason, wrote that the song was known throughout her part of the Appalachians and that even within her family it was sung to two or three tunes with varying words. She is credited with one of the earliest recordings, in 1948. The Osborne Brothers recorded it on 15 November 1960 at the Bradley Film & Recording Studio in Nashville, with Bobby Osborne on mandolin and lead vocal, Sonny Osborne on banjo, Jimmy Brown Jr. on guitar and vocals, Hank Garland on electric guitar, Pete Drake on steel guitar, Lightnin’ Chance on bass and Buddy Harman on drums, and MGM released it in December 1960 as a single with “At the First Fall of Snow.”
