The Major's only son

“The Major’s Only Son” is a text of parental opposition and class distinction. It reads like an old English ballad but with a pietistic slant. The subject was John (or “Crazy”) Jones (ca. 1727-96), who on a second copy in the Thomas collection, The Major’s Only Son, is further identified as “a native of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”[1]

The text references to Dives, Lazarus, and Abraham might point to a masonic influence but no information about the author has surfaced. The song is in sophisticated language, which seems to validate local attitudes toward class distinction. In addition, the girl’s long “resignation to death” passage has elements of clerical preaching. While it is not clear who “the Major” was, further identification of the son might be made from his being called “at Rochester to preach” (line 43).

There were many printings of this broadside from the 1790s to the 1840s and the song went into oral tradition. Charles Brewster describes an old woman named Eunice Hoyt who sold “2-penny ballads” in the Old Spring Market in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She called them “vairses,” and her stock included “that peculiarly touching ditty the Major’s Only Son” and “Barbara Allen” (2: chapter 132). Frank C. Brown collected the lyric in a much-shortened version in 1916 with the insanity ending omitted (Belden and Hudson 2:259-61; Roud; John Hay 413-14, 627-28). There must have been an associated tune for this song in circulation at some point as Octavius K. Yates’s Poland Tragedy (1856) and Lines on the Great Calamity at Lawrence (1860) call for the tune of “Major’s Only Son.”