Week 39 – Stroll Away the Morning Dew

It must have been 1976 or 77 when I discovered a remarkable thing: folk dancing can be fun. It happened like this…

Before I was born, my parents used to go out dancing a lot: ballroom, old time, barn dances, square dances. Then in my teens, when I was old enough not to need a babysitter any more, they started dancing again, mainly at dinner dances organised by the school PTA. When my Mum tried  to teach me to waltz, or do the foxtrot, I was completely uninterested. And although a bunch of my schoolfriends went to a PTA barn dance – and had fun, to be fair – I don’t think any of us considered it might be something we’d want to do on a regular basis. Similarly, when I discovered folk music at the end of 1975, I enjoyed the jigs and reels played by bands like Steeleye and the Chieftains, but thought of them only as music to listen to, not as music you might dance to.  But when my Mum and Dad were invited to a barn dance in the village hall at Warehorne, a few miles from where we lived, at the last minute I tagged along. And it was a revelation.

What really made the difference was the band – the Oyster Ceilidh Band, whose music was not only extremely energetic and danceable, but also very listenable. I was hooked, and (along with quite a number of my teenage friends) became a regular at the dances organised by Ron and Jean Saunders at Warehorne. It was a tiny village hall, and the six or seven-piece band would crowd onto a stage created by placing boards on top of the snooker table (some years later I discovered that this had also been the practice in the 1930s, when Charlie Bridger – of whom more another week – used to play for village hops in the same hall).

At my 18th birthday party John Jones, Chris Taylor and Cathy Lesurf from the Oyster Ceilidh Band came along to play and call a few dances. And as a birthday present Cathy gave me a copy of Maud Karpeles’ The Crystal Spring Volume 2. This is a collection of songs collected by Cecil Sharp, and over the years I’ve found it to be a really good source of songs. But I was particularly excited to find that one of the songs had been collected in  Warehorne.

This was a song which, in The Crystal Spring, is given the title of ‘The Baffled Knight’, and which Sharp collected in Warehorne on 23 September 1908 from James Beale. Even at 18 I realised, I think, that ‘The Baffled Knight’ was a ballad scholar’s title, not what a traditional singer would have used (it doesn’t even mention a knight in Mr Beale’s song – it’s a shepherd’s son who is “baffled”). A few years later, when I looked at the copy of Sharp’s manuscripts in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, I found that in fact Mr Beale had also sung “Stroll away the morning dew”, rather than the more usual “Blow away the morning dew”. So that’s what I’ve sung ever since, and that’s how I refer to the song.

James Beale’s last verse was

So if you meet any pretty girl
And your father in the town
O never mind her squalling
Or the rumpling of her gown

But I prefer to stick with the “if you will not when you can / you shall not when you would” verse given by Maud Karpeles.

You can find out more about the ballad and its history at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baffled_Knight

Stroll Away the Morning Dew

Week 38 – George Collins

If – in a folk song at least – you ride /walk / roam / rove out on a May morning, you are guaranteed to meet a member of the opposite sex. That encounter may lead to a bit of rumpy-pumpy, maybe even true love; but it might have darker consequences.

Exactly what’s going on in this version isn’t clear: who is the woman that George Collins meets? how does she know he’s going to die? and what does he die of? But none of those things really matters – they just add to the song’s wonderfully mysterious air. And in any case, what is clear from the final verse is that George was a bit of a ladies’ man, a pin-up perhaps, news of whose death leads to six pretty maids dying of a broken heart.

Actually, ballad scholars do have a pretty good idea of how this story started out. In his notes to the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, A L Lloyd wrote:

The plot of  George Collins  has its secrets.  From an examination of a number of variants, the full story becomes clearer.  The girl by the stream is a water-fairy.  The young man has been in the habit of visiting her. He is about to marry a mortal, and the fairy takes her revenge with a poisoned kiss.  The song telling that story is among the great ballads of Europe.  Its roots and branches are spread in Scandinavia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere.  An early literary form is the German poem of the Knight of Staufenberg (c. 1310).  France alone has about ninety versions, mostly in the form of the familiar  Le Roi Renaud,  though here much of the dream-quality of the tale is missing, since the girl by the stream is lost sight of, and instead the hero is mortally wounded in battle.  The first half of the George Collins story is told in the ballad called  Clerk Colvill  (Child 42), the second half in Lady Alice (Child 85).  Either these are two separate songs which have been combined to form George Collins or (which seems more likely) they are two fragments of the completer ballad.  George Collins has rarely been reported in England, though in the summer of 1906 Dr. G. B. Gardiner collected three separate versions in different Hampshire villages, two of them on the same day.  (FSJ vol.III, pp.299-301)

N.B. I’ve copied that chunk of text from a post by Malcolm Douglas – who edited Classic English Folk Songs, the revised EFDSS reprint of the Penguin Book – on Mudcat. That discussion also contains some interesting American variants. One starts

‘Twas at a western water tank
One cold December day
And in an empty boxcar
A dying hobo lay

but then recognisably becomes a version of  ’George Collins’ in the second verse

You see his girl in yonders hall
A-sewing her silk so fine
But when she heard poor George was dead
She laid her silks aside

Enos White and his wife, from the Copper Family website

The versions collected by Gardiner in Hampshire – the source of the composite version in the Penguin volume – can be found on the EFDSS Take Six website.

This version, however, was collected – also in Hampshire - by Bob Copper in the 1950s from Enos White of Axford. I think I first heard it performed by Shirley and Dolly Collins on the  LP The Sweet Primeroses, but learned the song from Bob’s book Songs and Southern Breezes. Enos White’s performance can be heard on O’er His Grave the Grass Grew Green (The Voice of the People Volume 3), while you can hear Bob himself singing it on the Veteran CD When the May is all in bloom.

George Collins

Week 37 – Queen of the May

Julia Margaret Cameron, Queen of the May, 1875

This was the first song I learned from a book of folk songs, rather than from a recording of Steeleye Span or the Watersons. This meant that I had to take my own decisions about how to sing it, without having someone else’s arrangement in my head (having said that, I don’t suppose I sang it in anything like my own voice but, as with everything else in those days, as a curious amalgam of wannabe Tim Hart, Mike Waterson and Martin Carthy at his most idiosyncratic).

I learned it, like last week’s song, from Fred Hamer’s book Garners Gay. Hamer recorded the song from Bedfordshire singer Harry Scott. Some recordings of Harry Scott have been made available, on the EFDSS cassette The Leaves of Life, but at present if you want to hear his ‘Queen of the May’ I think you’ll need to visit the British Library Sound Archive – which so far, I haven’t.

Looking out of the window on this May Bank Holiday, I think the young lady in the song might well have said “I’m not going with you, because you’ll get my dress horribly muddy”; or perhaps just stayed at home in the dry.

Queen of the May

Week 36 – Northill May Song

Learned many years ago from Fred Hamer’s lovely little book, Garners Gay. Fred collected it from “Chris Marsom and others” – Mr Marsom had by that time emigrated to Canada, but Fred met him on a visit to his native Northill, Bedfordshire. Fred’s notes say

The Day Song is much too long for inclusion here and the Night Song has the same tune. It was used by Vaughan Williams as the tune for No. 638 of the English Hymnal, but he gave it the name of “Southill” because it was sent to him by a Southill man. Chris Marsom who sang this to me had many tales to tell of the reception the Mayers had from some of the ladies who were strangers to the village and became apprehensive at the approach of a body of men to their cottage after midnight on May Eve.

You can hear Vaughan Williams’ setting of the tune (one of many traditional tunes which he slipped in to the English Hymnal) at cyberhymnal.org

text: ‘Jerusalem My Happy Home’
tune: ‘Southill’, tra­di­tion­al arranged Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Eng­lish Hymn­al (Lon­don: Ox­ford Un­i­ver­si­ty Press, 1906), num­ber 638 (MI­DI, score)

There’s more information on May Day customs in and around Northill – and some nice old photos – on the Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service website.

Young men going maying including the bride and Moggers and Moggies.
From "Old Village Customs in Northill" page at www.bedfordshire.gov.uk

On 1st May several customs were observed. Children would go garlanding, a garland being, typically, a wooden hoop over which a white cloth was stretched. A looser piece of cloth was fastened at the top which was used to cover the finished garland. Two dolls were fastened in the middle, one large and one small. Ribbons were sewn around the front edge and the rest of the space was filled with flowers. The dolls were supposed to represent the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. The children would stop at each house and ask for money to view the garland.

Another custom, prevalent throughout the county if not the country, was maying. It was done regularly until the outbreak of the First World War and, sporadically, afterwards. Young men would go around at night with may bushes singing May carols. In the morning a may bush was attached to the school flag pole, another would decorate the inn sign at the Crown and others rested against doors, designed to fall in when they were opened. Those maying included a Lord and a Lady, the latter the smallest of the young men with a veil and bonnet. The party also included Moggers or Moggies, a man and a woman with black faces, ragged clothes and carrying besom brushes.

And finally – before we get to the song itself (which is very short) here’s a link to a recently posted May Day video from Pete Castle. Pete lived in Bedfordshire in the seventies and eighties, and he met and recorded Mrs Marjorie “Mum” Johnstone who had sung a couple of May songs for Fred Hamer some 20 years earlier. The video has “Mum” singing the two songs, and talking about her involvement in May Day customs as a young girl.

Northill May Song

Week 35 – The Lark in the Morning

The Lark in the Morning - from the Bodleian Library collection

Here’s the opening track from the new Magpie Lane CD, The Robber Bird. I learned this from Roy Palmer’s excellent book Folk Songs collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams (now republished as Bushes and Briars). Vaughan Williams noted down the tune and first verse on the 24th April 1904, from Mrs Harriet Verrall, of Monk’s Gate, Horsham in Sussex; Roy added further verses from a printed broadside. The song itself is a celebration of ploughboys’ sexual prowess – it is taken as read that they worked hard, but here it is made clear that they also knew how to have a good time, and were fecund to boot. We top and tail our arrangement with ‘The Muffin Man’, a dance tune from the manuscript tune book of William Mittell, dated 1799, from New Romney in Kent. I learned this from the ABC notation file transcribed by George Frampton, and made available by the Village Music Project.

The Robber Bird is not currently available even in the very best record shops. But you can order it online from www.magpielane.co.uk

Or of course you could buy a copy at one of our gigs. We will be celebrating the 108th anniversary of the collection of this song in Reading on Tuesday, at the Museum of English Rural Life, with the wonderful Hilary James and Simon Mayor.

Magpie Lane

Andy Turner: vocal, G/D anglo-concertina
Mat Green: fiddle, vocal
Sophie Thurman: cello, vocal
Jon Fletcher: bouzouki, vocal
Ian Giles: drum, vocal

Week 34 – The Banks of Sweet Mossen

Collected by Bob Copper in the 1950s, from Jim Swain of Angmering in Sussex. The words and music can be found in Bob’s book Songs and Southern Breezes, and you can hear Jim Swain singing the song on The Voice of the People Volume 10. I first heard the song on Shirley Collins’ 1974 LP Adieu to Old England.

I was surprised to find that this song shares the same Roud number as ‘As Broad as I was Walking‘. There’s little to link them on the surface, and a Roud number search of the Take Six Archive suggests that collected versions are either like ‘As Broad…’ or like ‘Banks…’  but not both. So while Mrs Webb’s ‘The Modest Maid’ is obviously a version of ‘Abroad as I was walking’, other songs such as Moses Blake’s ‘Nancy’ or Moses Mills’ ‘Twas Down in the Valley’ are clearly related to ‘Banks of the Mossen’.

Down in Yonder Valley - broadside from the Bodleian Collection

The same seems to be true of ballads on the Bodleian site: Harding B 17(196a) – ‘Modest Maid’ is without doubt a precursor of  ’Abroad as I was walking’ (in fact the words as sung by Mr Johnson seem to have changed very little from the broadside version); and Harding B 17(78b) – ‘Down in Yonder Valley’ seems to show how ‘Banks…’ started life.

But on a discussion on the Tradsong list Steve Gardham – quite an expert in these matters – suggested that both songs had a common ancestor, in the shape of

18th century broadsides which showed they were the same song called Beautiful Nancy… An Evans printing is in the Madden Collection, but you can view a Pitts version slightly later, called ‘Down in Yonder Valley’ on the Bodl site, Harding B17 (78).

The Madden Collection, unfortunately, has not been made available online (come on Cambridge!) so I’ll have to take Steve’s word for it.

Finally, this song has been referred to under a variety of titles: Banks of the Mossen, Mossem, Mossom, Mossing… but Mike Tristram, in the same Tradsong discussion, says

‘Mossen’ by the way in my understanding is a saxon plural ie ‘mosses’, rather than the name of a river, in other words it is ‘mossy banks’ good for lambs and love, rather [than] riverbanks.

The Banks of Sweet Mossen

Week 33 – The Leaves of Life

A suitably sombre song for Good Friday. I learned this many, many years ago from the singing of Norma Waterson on the Watersons’ seminal 1965 LP Frost and Fire. (A note for the uninitiated: it is a legal requirement that certain album titles be preceded by the word “seminal”, and Frost and Fire is certainly one of those).

The sleeve notes to the LP, written by A.L. Lloyd, say:

This spring-time ballad-carol tells a story based on the Apocryphal Gospels, concerning a trip made by Mary to see her son at Calvary, in the company of seven virgins. The opening recalls the handsome illuminations in the Arundel Psalter, showing the sombre tree of death with its dismal birds, and the dazzling tree of life with iridescent leaves. The parallel between the death and resurrection of Christ and the ritual slaying and renewal of the divine kings of pagan belief (echoed in the mumming plays) needs no stressing.

The carol is included in A Good Christmas Box, published in Dudley in 1847 (although clearly this is not actually a Christmas carol). Sharp and Vaughan Williams both collected a number of versions, all in Shropshire and Herefordshire. Vaughan Williams included the carol in Twelve Traditional Carols from Herefordshire  and then in the Oxford Book of Carols. The notes to the latter say:

Melody and a version of the text from Mrs Whatton and Mrs Loveridge, The Homme, Dilwyn. From Twelve Traditional Carols from Herefordshire (Leather and Vaughan Williams), Stainer & Bell. Cf Popular Carols, by F Sidwick (Sidwick and Jackson). This fine example of the way in which a mystical vision is created by the best folk-poetry appeared in the Staffordshire A Good Christmas Box. 1847, Sylvester (1861) printed a version of it from an ‘old Birmingham broadside’. Sir A Quiller-Couch included it in the Oxford Book of English Verse, and Walter de la Mare in Come Hither.

In really important news yesterday, the English Folk Dance & Song Society announced that they had been successful in applying for funding to proceed with the Full English project. This will digitise and make freely available the folk song collections of Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams, Lucy Broadwood and a host of others. So in future, if we want for instance to check out all of the collected versions of this song, we will be able to do so at the click of a mouse. Excellent news.

One of the versions which Vaughan Williams collected came from the gypsy singer Mrs Esther Smith, mother of May Bradley, from whom Fred Hamer recorded the song some 50 years later. You can hear May Bradley sing the song on the Musical Traditions CD Sweet Swansea.

The Leaves of Life

Crucifixion, The Arundel Psalter f.52v (British Library)

Week 32 – The Rakish Young Fellow

During my time at Oxford, the Heritage Society, the University folk club, was supposedly run by students, but in fact it received a very significant helping hand from former student Caroline Jackson-Houlston – who is still active today in the running of the Friday night Oxford Folk Club. I sang with Caroline in various vocal harmony groups throughout my time as a student. In my last year we performed as a duo, under the name Flash Company, and this was one of our songs.

The song was collected by Cecil Sharp from William Nott, Meshaw, Devon in 1904, but I’m pretty sure that Caroline learned the song from Sam Richards and Tish Stubbs’ book The English Folksinger.

This Mudcat thread provides links to a number of more modern versions involving airmen, Lancers and stockmen as well as sailors – oh and a decidedly politically incorrect Australian parody which commences “Charlotte the harlot lay dying, A piss-pot supporting her head…”

I sang this last night at the Frittenden Old Fashioned Night Out
I chose it because it’s a song with a jolly chorus. Temporarily forgetting that actually it’s a song about a man planning his funeral. And that maybe this wasn’t the best choice given that a very close friend had died the previous night, after a long illness. But actually, as I got to the last verse it occurred to me that this was exactly the kind of rumbustious  funeral Dave might have planned for himself. Wherever you are Dave, RIP.

Ballad sheet from the Bodleian Library collection. Published J. Pitts, Seven Dials, between 1819 and 1844

The Rakish Young Fellow

Week 31 – The Rambling Sailor

Ballad sheet from the Bodleian collection; printed by H. Such between 1863 and 1885

Next weekend I will be appearing – in what seems to have become a bit of a tradition – at the Frittenden Festival in Kent. The theme for the afternoon session this year is “Sea, ships and sailors”. Now I don’t sing many songs about life at sea; but I do seem to have a lot of songs about sailors on shore, making a nuisance of themselves with members of the opposite sex. Here’s an example which I’ve known for years, although I’m not sure that I’ve ever sung it in public – can’t think why though, and I certainly intend to rectify that next week.

I first heard the song back in the late seventies, sung by Tim Hart on the LP Folk Songs of Old England Vol. 1; then Cathy Lesurf sang a version on the Oyster Ceilidh Band album Jack’s Alive. And more recently, of course, it has been popularised once again by Spiers & Boden / Bellowhead with their stomping version. The way I sing it is based on the recording of Chris Willett on the old Topic LP The Roving Journeymen (now also available on We’ve Received Orders to Sail, Volume 12 of the Voice of the People set).

As well as the fine tune, I’m very taken with Young Johnson’s boast that he has “received commission from the King, to court all girls is handsome”. A likely story, but no doubt the dream job of many a tar.

If you’re after a less well-known version of the song, you could do much worse than investigate the way it was sung by the wonderful Australian singer and musician Sally Sloane – that’s on an excellent 2 CD set of Australian field recordings called Sharing the Harvest: highly recommended.

The Rambling Sailor

Week 30 – The Nobleman’s Wedding

Dedicated to my dear friend and musical colleague, Dave Parry, who suggested some twenty years ago that I should sing this song.

It was collected by H.E.D. Hammond in May 1906, from a Mrs Crawford of  West Milton in Dorset. I learned the song from Frank Purslow’s book Marrowbones, but of course you can now find the song in the EFDSS Take Six archive.

The song has been widely collected in England, Scotland, Ireland and North America. There are American versions with the title ‘The Awful Wedding’. We’ve certainly played at a few of those…

The Nobleman’s Wedding