“House Carpenter” is the American name for one of the oldest supernatural ballads in the English-language tradition — the ballad the folklorist Francis James Child catalogued as number 243, “The Daemon Lover” or “James Harris.” Its earliest known form is a broadside printed in 1657, titled “A Warning for Married Women.”
The story is a grim one. A woman, married to a house carpenter and the mother of his children, is visited by a former lover returned from the sea — in the older versions plainly a ghost or demon. He tempts her with promises of riches and a fleet of ships, and she abandons her home to sail away with him. Before long the ship goes down, and she is carried to her doom; the ballad ends as a warning against broken vows.
The song crossed to America and became one of the most widely collected ballads in the southern mountains, where it was usually titled “The House Carpenter.”
