Week 281 – King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O

In my previous post I related how, around 35 years ago, I discovered Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music in Newcastle Poly library. Now there are certain tracks on those 6 LPs which I consider to be as fine as anything ever committed to shellac, vinyl, or whatever it is they make CDs out of. I’m thinking especially of Buell Kazee’s ‘Butcher’s Boy’, Dock Boggs’ ‘Country Blues’, and Clarence Ashley’s ‘House Carpenter’. I’ve never learned any of those. In fact I think I’ve only ever learned three songs from the whole Anthology, and I’ve not posted any of them here till now.

This song doesn’t reach classic status, but it stuck in my mind and, like Old John Braddalum, I made a point of learning it when I became a parent. Both were a staple part of the Turner family singalong repertoire on long car journeys, so it’s very pleasing that Joe is now able to provide the banjo accompaniment the song really needs.

The version on the Anthology was recorded by Chubby Parker for Columbia Records in New York, August 1928. Parker was a hugely popular entertainer on the National Barn Dance radio show, broadcast on Chicago radio station WLS, between 1925 and 1931.

Chubby Parker – from the My Old Weird America blog.

The song itself dates back to Elizabethan time. According to Wikipedia

Its first known appearance is in Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotland (1548) under the name “The Frog cam to the Myl dur”, though this is in Scots rather than English. There is a reference in the London Company of Stationers’ Register of 1580 to “A Moste Strange Weddinge of the Frogge and the Mouse.” There are many texts of the ballad; however the oldest known musical version is in Thomas Ravenscroft‘s Melismata in 1611.

 

 

The Marriage of the Frogge and the Mouse, from Thomas Ravenscroft’s Melismata (1611)

There are several nineteenth century broadside printings of ‘The frog in the cock’d hat’ in the Bodleian Broadside collection, and numerous versions have been collected from oral tradition in Britain and North America.

 

King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O

Andy Turner – vocal
Joe Turner – 5-string banjo, vocal

Week 261 – The Hawk and the Crow

Well, after a brief hiatus, here’s the first non-weekly instalment of A Folk Song A Week. I learned this from one of my absolute favourite singers, Kevin Mitchell, via his 1977 Topic LP Free and Easy. Kevin calls it ‘Two Strings on a Bow’, and he learned it from Anne Brolly of Dungiven, County Derry. The LP notes say

American singers call this song The Bird’s Courtship or The Leather Winged Bat

(indeed I was reminded of the song recently when listening to Elizabeth Laprelle’s solo album, The Birds’ Advice)

– it’s quite common there but only once has it been collected in the British Isles; Peter Kennedy and Sean O’Boyle obtained it from Liam O’Connor of Pomeroy, Co. Tyrone…

Kevin has changed the tune of the chorus so that the air as a whole is that of the hornpipe The Cuckoo’s Nest – a not inappropriate combination of tune and words.

The version collected by Peter Kennedy from Liam O’Connor in 1953 was included in his mammoth book Folksongs of Britain and Ireland.

The Hawk and the Crow