Pretty Little Miss in the Garden

The story turns on a returning lover. A man rides past a young woman in her garden and asks her to marry him. She answers that her love has been seven years at sea and that no one else can have her. He suggests that her sweetheart may have drowned, died in a battle or married someone else; she replies that she would love whatever girl he married. Then he draws a ring from his pocket, she falls at the sight of it, and he lifts her up and tells her he is the soldier come home to marry her.

Cousin Emmy recorded it as “Pretty Fair Miss Out in the Garden” for Decca in 1947, and Roscoe Holcomb and the New Lost City Ramblers also recorded it. The Stanley Brothers recorded it as “Pretty Little Miss in the Garden” on 14 August 1963 at King Studio in Cincinnati, with Carter Stanley singing lead and Ralph Stanley tenor; it came out on The Country Folk Music Spotlight (King, December 1963). Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys recorded it as “Pretty Fair Maiden in the Garden” on 3 November 1966 in Nashville, with Peter Rowan, Lamar Grier, Richard Greene, Buddy Spicher and James Monroe; Decca issued it as a single (32075) in December 1966, and on the album Blue Grass Time (1967). In 1997 Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded it with Alison Krauss singing harmony at Masterlink Studios in Nashville for Clinch Mountain Country (Rebel, 1998), a set of duets with guest singers that won the IBMA’s Album of the Year and Recorded Event of the Year awards in 1999.