Week 309 – The Cherington Wassail

Last week I posted a Wassail song which was definitely collected in Oxfordshire: The Adderbury Wassail. My searches of the VWML catalogue also threw up 3 phonograph recordings made by James Madison Carpenter, all of the same song. None of the recordings is dated, and all are credited to an unnamed “Oxfordshire Singer”.

The first thing that struck me about the song is that it is very reminiscent of the well-known wassail printed in the Oxford Book of Carols as ‘The Gloucestershire Wassail’. Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire are neighbouring counties, so I wondered if this particular strain of wassail song had crossed over the border. However, the more I look into it, the more likely it seems that the American collector Carpenter was confused, and wrongly labelled a song he had actually recorded in Gloucestershire.

The GlosTrad website has a list of songs collected by Carpenter in the county. This includes three wassails. Both the Avening and Minchinhampton songs are similar, but clearly not the same as these “Oxfordshire” recordings. The Cherington Wassail Song on the other hand looks suspiciously close.

The song’s source is given on the website as Tanner, Thomas and Howes Mr and Phelps, Charlie. Carpenter’s own notes are quoted thus:

Mr Howes has known for sixty years. Bowl decorated with fox’s brush and holly bow, with bough, decorated with ribbons. Charlie Phelps checked the Cherrington (sic) Wassail sung by Tom Tanner.

I did wonder if Thomas Tanner was related to the Bampton singer Charles Tanner, and that was where the Oxfordshire connection came from. But the GlosTrad page on Thomas Tanner tells us that he came from a well-established Cherington family, so I think that’s a red herring. When I consulted members of the Traditional Song Forum, the replies I got suggested that Carpenter’s attributions were not always to be relied upon.

Elaine Bradtke, who works for the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, wrote

I’ve been working on the Carpenter Collection with Julia Bishop.  A couple things to note: Carpenter was not the best of record keepers. His indexes for cylinders and discs are often rather vague, or just plain incorrect, and I suspect they were made significantly later than the recordings themselves. He also seemed to be a little geographically challenged, so his indications of locations may not always be correct. But that’s what we had to work with when we indexed the collection.  After we transcribed much of the material, we were able to match many of the texts to the recordings and give more precise attributions.  However, this doesn’t seem to be the case with Cylinder 131 00:00. We don’t know who sang it or where it was sung.

You are correct, it is very close to the Gloucestershire versions.  Especially Avening, and Cherrington where they repeat “Our bowl it is made of some mappelin tree With our wassailing bowl we’ll bring unto thee”. But it is not an exact match to any of the typescript texts in the collection.  I would say it’s probably Gloucestershire, despite what his own index said.

The GlosTrad site – and I’ve no doubt that the site’s founders Carol and Gwilym Davies will have based this attribution on the best information available – lists Tom Tanner as the singer of ‘The Unquiet Grave’, which comes immediately after the Wassail song on this recording https://www.vwml.org/record/VWMLSongIndex/SN18617. So I’m going to assume that it’s also Tanner singing the Wassail – it certainly sounds to me like the same singer. So I’m also assuming that the song I’m posting here is essentially the Cherington Wassail.

Out of laziness as much as anything else, I’ve sung the words from this transcription by Carpenter, which uses a standard chorus, rather than repeating the last two lines of the song.

Incidentally, all three Wassails collected by Carpenter in Gloucestershire refer to the bowl being made of the “mappelin” or “maypolin” tree. As far as I can tell, this is simply another name for the maple.

The Cherington Wassail

Andy Turner – vocal, G/D anglo-concertina

Week 271 – The Gloucestershire Wassail

Here is to Fillpail and to his left ear
Pray God send our master a happy New Year

I first came across this Wassail song in the Oxford Book of Carols in the 1970s – although, unlike the ‘Somerset Wassail’ it never actually became part of my repertoire. With a slightly different set of words the song was part of the Magpie Lane Christmas set from the very beginning, and we recorded it – with a different singer leading each verse – on our 1995 CD Wassail.

For this recording I’ve gone back to the version in the Oxford Book of Carols. The notes with the song tell us that the tune was collected by Vaughan Williams “from an old person in Gloucestershire”. Actually, it turns out that Vaughan Williams took it down in the inn at Pembridge in Herefordshire, in July or August 1909, from a singer whose name he did not record, but who presumably was a native of Gloucestershire.

The words printed in the book were collated from other versions collected by Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams in Gloucestershire – from William Bayliss of Buckland and Isaac Bennett of Little Sodbury – as well as nineteenth century printed sources. Magpie Lane’s words are closer to those originally collected by RVW at the inn in Pembridge.

You can find several other Wassail songs collected in Gloucestershire on Gwilym Davies’ GlosTrad site; and can read much more about this song, and the tradition which it accompanied, on the Gloucestershire Christmas website.

Tetbury Wassailers in about 1930. Photo by James Madison Carpenter, copyright the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. From http://www.gloschristmas.com

 

Waes Hael!

 

The Gloucestershire Wassail

Andy Turner – vocal, G/D anglo-concertina

 

Week 224 – All Hail and Praise

Many people have felt unwilling to criticise Kennedy, or to expose his illegal Folktrax publications, on the (pragmatic) grounds that he has actually made the recordings available.  They are no longer available from the EFDSS… and much of the BBC material has been lost…  Like a black-marketeer in wartime, Kennedy has been tolerated because “Where else can you get a pair of nylons?”

Rod Stradling, in an article on the more questionable aspects of the collector Peter Kennedy’s work, at http://www.mustrad.org.uk/enth53.htm

I never owned more than a handful of Folktrax cassettes – I was put off by the shoddy packaging as much as anything. But I have to admit (as proof of Rod’s point) to being rather glad that I bought a copy of Folktrax cassette FTX-504 The Bitter Withy: Early Folk Carols, as it contains a number of songs which are not, as far as I’m aware, available elsewhere. The opening track is ‘All Hail and Praise’, sung by Ralph Thomas from the village of Ashton-under-Hill (now in Worcestershire,  but part of Gloucestershire until the 1930s). It was recorded, not by Peter Kennedy but by Peter Duddridge, in May 1958.

Gwilym Davies told me that there had once been a flourishing carol-singing tradition in and you can read more about this on his excellent Gloucestershire Christmas site:

The Ashton carols were sung by the bell ringers when they came round the village on Boxing Day, but were not sung in the church and the custom died out just after World War II. The carollers were Ken Pratt, Ken Pratt’s father, Albert Langley, Charlie Moore and Frank Whittle (who lost a leg at Mons and who had a lovely voice).  They sometimes sang in parts (although it is not clear to what extent Mrs Roberson wrote the published parts).  Between the Wars Ralph Cotton used to accompany the carollers on violin.  The carollers went round late at night with a lantern on a bean pole.  The very last time they sang was in the 1960s when Fred invited them in to sing in the Tudor room at Stanley Farm.  One of the carols ‘All Hail and Praise the Sacred Morn’ used to be sung at in the nearby Worcestershire village of Elmley Castle at midnight on New Year’s Eve, after which the singers would go to the church gates and sing it there. That was last done in the 1970’s when Reg Berry was one of the carollers.

Naturally Gwilym’s site also includes a page on ‘All Hail and Praise’, where you  can hear a recording of the carol being sung by Ralph Thomas.

 

We sang this for a couple of years with Magpie Lane but, even at the time, I’m not sure I ever got a firm grip on the words. For this recording I had them in large print right in front of me. I’ve never come across this set of words anywhere else, and they just don’t seem very memorable somehow. Maybe, having over the years sung ‘Arise and Hail the Joyful Day’, ‘Arise and Hail the Sacred Day’, ‘Arise and Hail the Glorious Star’, ‘Awake Arise Good Christians’, and any number beginning ‘Hark! Hark!’ or ‘Hail! Hail! Hail!’, I’ve simply reached saturation point with carols. Still, if you go wrong, it should be fairly easy to improvise, as long as you can string together a bunch of lines rhyming born/morn, star/far, bring/sing/king, earth/birth/mirth and – if you’re from the West of England – join/divine.

Incidentally, keen Roud number-spotters will be getting really excited about this one. It didn’t seem to be in Mr Roud’s index, so I got in touch with Steve, and he’s had a rummage around in his bottom drawer, and found a spare one for this carol – it’s now Roud 25791.

All Hail and Praise

Andy Turner – vocal, C/G anglo-concertina

Week 129 – Jack Williams

Another robber meets a sticky end…

Here’s a very first outing for a song which I’ve only just learned. I discovered it a few years ago on a visit to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, leafing through the bound volumes of Cecil Sharp’s Folk Tunes and Folk Words. I think I first came across the song as noted from Harry Richards of Curry Rivel in Somerset, then sought out a fuller version, which led me to this version, from Mrs Elizabeth Smitherd (or is it Smilhard?) of Tewkesbury.

I am a boatman, noted by Cecil Sharp from Mrs Elizabeth Smitherd, Tewkesbury, 11 Apr 1908. Image copyright EFDSS.

I have collated Mrs Smitherd’s words with texts from several sources – broadside printings from the Bodleian’s collection (such as the one shown below), and North American versions including one from Ballads and sea songs from Nova Scotia by William Roy Mackenzie, the words of which are reproduced on this Mudcat thread. A bit further down that same thread, Malcolm Douglas says “The song had reached America by at least 1835, when it appeared in The Forget Me Not Songster, between The Rambling Soldier and Canada I O.” And you can now see that version (in an 1840 printing) online, courtesy of the Internet Archive.

You can find several broadside versions of the song at Ballads Online and in the Full English archive.

Jack Williams, the boatman, from the Bodleian Broadside collection, Printed by J.K. Pollock, North Shields, between 1815 and 1855.

As for the oral tradition, the Full English site has three versions collected in the early twentieth century by Sharp, one by Alfred Williams and one by George Butterworth, all from Southern England.

Most versions have a happy ending, but I just don’t buy that. No convincing explanation is given as to how Jack Williams manages to break free from prison, just “and then I escaped”. So in my version, I’m afraid, he is left not only complaining about his perfidious lover, but contemplating an unhappy fate.

Jack Williams

Week 66 – As Sylvie was walking

“Bunch of green ribbons” from the Bodleian collection

The first song in the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs is from Lower Beeding, Sussex. The next is from Moonee Ponds, Victoria, in Australia. The singer, the octagenarian Mrs. Ann Aston, had been living in Australia since 1855, but had been  born in Coleford, Gloucestershire. She had learned the song from an uncle, who also hailed from Gloucestershire.

The notes to the book say “This song was sent to W. P. Merrick from Australia” – by whom, I’m afraid I know not – and “The text has been amplified from versions sung to H.E.D. Hammond in 1906 by two Dorset women, Mrs. Hann of Stoke Abbot and Mrs. Russell of Upwey.  A version from Lew Down, Devon, appears in Songs of the West (Baring-Gould and others, 1905) under the title of A Maiden Sat A-Weeping.”  Malcolm Douglas’ expanded notes to the reprint (Classic English Folk Songs) point out that the final verse appears to come from the Baring-Gould version.

In the folk revival, the most widely sung version is probably that based on the recording by Pentangle (“Once I had a sweetheart” from Cruel Sister), which seems to derive from a version collected by Sharp in Somerset. But I really like John Kirkpatrick’s arrangement of Baring-Gould’s “A Maiden Sat A-Weeping” on the Brass Monkey album Going and Staying. Steeleye Span were so taken with the “Sails of Silver” line that they based a whole song around it, the title track of their 1980 LP.

As for my own arrangement, I can no longer recall if the D minor – Eb major chord progression was the result of musical inspiration, or just a happy accident. Probably the latter, to be honest.

As Sylvie was walking

Andy Turner: vocal, C/G anglo-concertina