Week 83 – A Week Before Easter

Well I’m nothing if not predictable – what song did you expect me to post here, the weekend before Easter?
Mind you, the opening couplet doesn’t ring very true today:

Now a week before Easter the morn bright and clear,
The sun it shone brightly and keen blew the air.

The air is keen all right, but I wouldn’t exactly call the morn bright and clear. Here’s the view from my window.

No roses in my back garden, and more snow than one would like, this week before Easter.

I think I first heard this sung by Barry Dransfield on the LP The Rout of the Blues, but I learned it from Bob Copper’s book A Song for Every Season. In the final chapter of that book, where Bob writes about the family’s connection with the folk establishment, there is this passage:

On 12 May 1952 we had arranged to give a concert of songs at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the E.F.D.S.S., in London  but early in the morning of that very day Uncle John was suddenly taken ill and died. I travelled up alone to make a token appearance and give the sad reason for our non-appearance as a family. I felt little like singing but was prevailed upon to sing just one item and I chose the song that Uncle John would have sung as a solo if he had been there, ‘The Week before Easter’. The last verse ran like this:

‘So dig me a grave both long, wide and deep,
And strew it all over with roses so sweet,
That I might lay down there and take a long sleep,
And that’s the right way to forget her.’

A few days later at a simple service in the little flint church John was laid to rest in that patch of Sussex earth to which so many of our family had been returned. I sent no wreath but threw on to his coffin as it lay in its last resting place a spray of roses and a card inscribed: ‘– and strew it all over with roses so sweet…’

As a Mudcat correspondent pointed out, Bob himself departed this world in the week before Easter, 2004. So this week’s song is dedicated to the memory of Bob Copper, a lovely man to whom so many of us owe so much.

A Week Before Easter

Week 45 – Sheep Shearing Song

I learned this from the singing of Bob and John Copper on the single LP selection from A Song for Every Season. Bob gives the background to the song in his book of the same name:

Shearing the wool off the back and belly of a sheep in such a manner as to finish up with a fleece of the maximum weight in one piece and in the minimum time was by no means a simple task. It was a skill that was developed over a number of years and, even then, really good shearers were few and far between. For this reason when it ‘came in season the lambs and ewes to shear’ a crew of expert shearers was formed to travel round from farm to farm in a given area and shear all the sheep at each farm in turn by piece-work. The crew from the Rottingdean area called themselves the Brookside Shearers, because the area they covered included all the ‘brook farms’ up the western side of the Ouse Valley from Newhaven to Lewes in what was known as Brookside Country. A crew consisted of a captain, who wore two stars on his hat, a lieutenant, who wore one star, twelve to fourteen men, picked for their skill at shearing and willingness to work hard for long hours, a wool winder to roll and stack the shorn fleeces and a tar-boy whose job it was to go round as required and dab tar – or in later years, powdered lime – on any accidental cuts in the sheep’s hide to stop the bleeding and to prevent flies from entering.

Bob Copper, A Song for Every Season, Heinemann, 1970, p116

This was the practice when Bob’s father Jim started shearing around the turn of the twentieth century, and things appeared to have changed very little for decades.

In an interview given to Vic Smith in 1970 – and now transcribed on the Musical Traditions website – Bob talked more about White Ram Night, which preceded the shearing, and the rather more rumbustious Black Ram Night which came at the end of their work:

They used to start off in their first night to make arrangements of where they were going and what they were going to do and that was called ‘White Ram Night’.  They’d agree on a pub for headquarters.  Usually it was the Red, White & Blue in Lewes.  It’s no longer a pub.  It was until fairly recently.  I’ve had a drink there.  Is it Friars Walk?  Anyway, it’s a green tiled place.  It was a horrible pub.  The worst of Victoriana, but they liked it.  They must have liked the landlady or her daughter or something.  Well, that was their headquarters.  Well, they used to start off on the first night, before the shearing actually started, on the Saturday before they started on the Monday morning.  That was called ‘White Ram’.  That was more or less just business.  There was plenty of beer, there always was.  Then they used to arrange where they were going.  The captain would read out which farms they were going to.  How many in each flock, “Well, we’ll get through that in two days.” And so on and so on.

Then they had a list of fines.  They used to …  If you leave a patch of wool as big as a half-crown on a sheep, you were fined sixpence.  And if it were bigger, it would be a shilling.  If you let your sheep go in the barn, that would cost you sixpence.  If you called a man a fool, sixpence; if you called him anything worse, a shilling.  And they all agreed on this because this all went into the kitty for Black Ram which was the last … which was the Saturday after the completion.  They used to meet on the following Saturday, pay out the wages due and the fines used to go into the kitty over the counter against food, salt beef, they used to have a very good do, cooked beef and bacon and goodness knows what.  That was Black Ram.  That was a really good night, a real humdinger and, in fact, the strong beer they used to drink was called Black Ram very strong, stronger than Old, like a very strong barley wine.  That was called Black Ram and that was a real humdinger.  That was a pretty beefy affair.  So that was the second one, Black Ram.

Sheep Shearing Song

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 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 27 – As Broad as I was Walking

photo c. 1940 by George Garland of Petworth, from the Copper Family website

Bob Copper’s book Songs and Southern Breezes tells, in his usual easy, good-natured style, of his time in the 1950s running a pub in Hampshire, whilst working as a song collector for the BBC. Bob paints vivid pen-portraits of the rustic characters from whom he collected songs, and the book includes transcriptions of some of these songs. There’s one group of songs, however, which came via a slightly different route, the singer – John Johnson of Fittleworth – having died some years before Bob arrived in the area.

Fortunately Mr Johnson had written out the words of his songs in a book, and his daughter Mrs Gladys Stone, and son John were still able to remember the tunes. This one was recorded from John Johnson junior at Reigate in Surrey.

You can find the words on the Copper Family website.

As Broad as I was Walking