Cecil Sharp's Note 22 (1916)

No. 22. Death and the Lady

For other versions with tunes see Journal of the Folk-Song Society (volume i, p. 169; volume ii, p. 137) ; Songs of the West (No. 99, 2d ed.); English Traditional Songs and Carols (p. 40) ; and Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time (pp. 164–168).

Chappell points out that this “is one of a series of popular ballads which had their rise from the celebrated Dance of Death,” and he quotes a very long “Dialogue betwixt an Exciseman and Death” from a copy in the Bagford Collection, dated 1659 (also given in Bell’s Songs of the Peasantry of England). There is a tune in Henry Carey’s Musical Century (volume i, p. 53), set to one of the recitatives in “A New Year’s Ode.” This is headed, “The melody stolen from an old ballad called Death and the Lady.” It is this tune which Chappell prints to the words of “Death and the Lady,” from A Guide to Heaven (1736). The words of this last version are on a broadside by Evans which I am fortunate enough to possess. It is ornamented with a curious old woodcut of a skeleton holding a scythe in one hand and an hour-glass in the other.