“I Never Will Marry” is a traditional song with no known author. Its British ancestor is a broadside ballad usually called “The Lover’s Lament for Her Sailor” (Roud 466, Laws K17), which printers in England, Ireland and Scotland turned out in large numbers; a text collected in Missouri in 1906 shows it was being sung in America by the early 1900s. In the United States, most traditional versions have been influenced by the Carter Family’s recording, made in 1933 in Camden, New Jersey.
The lyric, in the Carter Family’s form, begins with a narrator walking along the seashore on a windy morning who hears a young woman crying out. She has been deserted by the man she loves; she declares that she will never marry or be any man’s wife, and plunges into the deep water, saying that the shells of the ocean will be her deathbed.
The Bailey Brothers and the Happy Valley Boys put it on a Rich-R-Tone 78 in October 1950, backed with “John Henry.” The Country Gentlemen recorded it as “I’ll Never Marry” on 13 May 1959 at Empire Studio in Takoma Park, Maryland, with Charlie Waller on lead, John Duffey on tenor and Pete Kuykendall on baritone; Starday issued it that month as a single, and again in 1962 on the LP Bluegrass at Carnegie Hall. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded it as “I’ll Be No Man’s Wife” at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 18 March 1962, with Flatt singing lead, Curly Seckler on tenor and Earl Scruggs on baritone, for Folk Songs of Our Land (Columbia, August 1962).
