Week 314 – The Barley Raking

You know how, when searching online for a recipe, your heart sinks when you reach one of those blogs, and realise that you’ve got to wade through screeds of text about the author’s personal life before you get to the recipe… well, this post is a bit like that. Feel free to scroll down to the bottom if you just want to hear the song. I won’t be offended (I won’t know!). And, as I’ve probably commented before, I do these blog posts for my own personal satisfaction, and if anyone else likes them that’s just a bonus. So, here goes.
When I was about 8 or 9, two new, young, male teachers started work at my primary school – Mr France and Mr Snow. I was in Mr France’s class in what these days would be Year 5, and I think it’s fair to say that he was a popular teacher with all of the class – very different from some of the older, fiercer teachers in the school. My mother taught at the same school, and definitely fell into that older, fiercer category. She and Barrie France seemed to hit it off, however, and they stayed in touch, and continued to meet up occasionally, after he moved on to a different school. And so it was, I suppose, that finding himself with two spare tickets for a barn dance at Warehorne, he offered them to my Mum. She and My Dad had been keen dancers before I was born – old time, barn dancing, square dancing, but definitely not jive or rock & roll. When I was old enough not to need a babysitter, they started going out again, mostly to school PTA dinner dances. I resisted all my Mum’s attempt to teach me to waltz or foxtrot, but when the PTA put on a barn dance that was open to fifth formers and above, a bunch of us went along and – much to our amazement, I think – had a really good time.
I’ve been trying to work out when Barrie France’s offer of tickets to this dance at Warehorne took place. I can’t decide if it was early 1976, or early 1977. I’m pretty sure I’d already heard of, and heard good things of, local band Fiddler’s Dram, which suggests that the later date is more likely; but the internet tells me that the first Whitstable May Day celebrations were held in 1976, and I’ve very definite memories of attending that event (and I wouldn’t have known about it, but for this dance). In either case, it came after my Damascene conversion to folk song. And so, on that fateful Friday when my Mum told me that she and Dad were going out to a dance that night – and that the band included members of Fiddler’s Dram – I asked if I could come along too. A phone call must have ensued (this would have involved walking to the phone box at the end of the road – my parents didn’t get a telephone installed until I went to university) and a ticket was procured. Having previously only danced to one of those sedate EFDSS-style piano accordion and music-stand bands, I was completely blown away by the band that night – the Oyster Ceilidh Band. Their playing was so full of energy, and the dancing wasn’t sedate, it was energetic and enthusiastic – dancing with abandon. Well, if you’re a lover of what was become known as English Ceilidh then you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Warehorne residents Ron and Jean Saunders put on regular dances with the Oyster Ceilidh Band in the village hall. After that, we went to every one, and to Oyster dances elsewhere (Boughton Under Blean village hall was another regular venue). And soon a bunch of my school friends were coming along, attracted by the liveliness of the events, and joining in enthusiastically. There were other events that Ron and Jean helped to organise too – I recall a music hall evening, carol-singing round the village (see Week 174 – Sweet Chiming Bells) and a Harvest festival.
We’ll come back to Warehorne in a moment. But I also want to mention the other part Barrie France played in my folky journey. He’d begun organising an occasional (monthly?) folk club in a side room at the Stour Centre, the fairly new leisure centre in Ashford. His interests lay at the Simon and Garfunkel / Tom Paxton end of the folk spectrum, rather than the trad stuff I had become obsessed with, but I went along with my best mate Mike Eaton. It was Mike’s dad’s copy of Below the Salt that had switched me on to folk music, and we were now singing in unaccompanied harmony, our repertoire consisting entirely of songs pinched from Steeleye and Watersons LPs. As I wrote recently elsewhere
Our singing style was a horrible mixture of teenage Kentish boys trying to imitate Tim Hart (who, I later discovered, affected that country yokel voice, because he thought his actual public school voice was too posh), Martin Carthy in his still brilliant but most affected early 70s period, and the East Yorkshire vocal stylings of Mike Waterson – who was only in his mid-30s at the time, but sounded like he was one of the old ‘uns.
But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it’s how most singers and musicians get started before, hopefully, finding their own way.
I have few memories of Barrie’s folk club. I think we might have gone along a couple of times at most, and I suspect that the club was a fairly short-lived venture. I do recall a Dutchman singing ‘It takes a worried man to sing a worried song’, and I think Ron and Jean Saunders might well have been there, performing with their son Jonathan (they later formed the Isle of Oxney Barn Dance Band, who were the first band I ever sat in with at a real dance in front of paying punters, and who I think might still be going, with Jonathan at the helm). And of course Mike and I would have sung – maybe ‘Spotted Cow’ or ‘Rosebud in June’, or perhaps ‘Swarthfell Rocks’, or ‘Bellman’, and almost certainly ‘Country Life’. The most important thing that happened, was that at the end of the evening we got chatting to a group of four girls. They hadn’t sung, but said they’d like to, and in the blink of an eye, we’d decided to form a group! The following Sunday afternoon, we all assembled in my Mum’s front room. There was Mike and me, and then Susan Hamlet, Lindsay Edwards, Caroline Chappell and ‘Bobo’ Woodruff (who declared that Mike, curled up in an armchair, looked like a dormouse). We’d just started sixth form, and they were a year older, in the Upper Sixth. I can’t actually remember if the six of us were ever all in the same place at the same time ever again, and this meeting certainly didn’t lead to us being a regular group (did we ever sing anywhere at all? I’m not sure we did). But Mike and I became good friends with Su Hamlet, and I learned a lot from her, one way and another (having eaten my Mum’s Sunday lunch one week, she told me that it had been horribly overcooked, and the beef was like tough old leather – not having much experience of other people’s cooking, this had never occurred to me, but actually she was absolutely correct!).
For his birthday that year, quite by chance, Mike was given a copy of the single LP selection from the Copper Family’s Song for every season and within the space of a couple of weeks we’d added almost all the songs from that record into our repertoire, Mike playing Ron to my Bob. And then, by the following summer I should think, we started singing with Alison Inns (sister of a school friend’s girlfriend) and Gill Harrison (sister of another friend in our year at school) and, sometimes, Jon Jarvis, who was slightly younger than us but whom we knew through the school choir and orchestra (Jonathan could actually play his instrument, which I’m not sure was really true of Mike with the violin, and definitely not of me with the trumpet). Mike’s Dad came up with our band name – Gomenwudu, which I believe is the name given to a harp in Beowulf (but I may have got that bit wrong). I don’t think Jon made it to Warehorne dances very often, but the rest of us did and, with the uninhibited arrogance of youth, we’d sometimes ask John Jones or Cathy Lesurf if we could sing a few songs at an Oyster ceilidh. And, bless them, they let us. And the audience were too polite to boo.
To put this in context, there were always song spots at these dances. Often from Fiddler’s Dram, or Beggars Description (see Week 277 – The First Time), or John Jones singing in harmony with his friend John Taylor; and, sometimes, John Jones would sing ‘The Barley Raking’ with Cathy Lesurf. So all of a considerably higher standard than anything we could aspire to.
There was one evening when we’d sung two or three songs at a Warehorne ceilidh, and they seemed to go down really well (cf. Samuel Johnson’s dog walking on its hind legs, and all that), and we were buzzing. To the extent that at the end of the night we mobbed John Jones and more or less forced him to dictate to us the words of ‘The Barley Raking’. Which meant that we had one more song in our repertoire! And I’ve sung it in various combinations ever since. Mike, Alison, Gill and I sang it unaccompanied; I sang it in my student days with Caroline Jackson-Houlston, again, unaccompanied; I worked up an accompaniment and arrangement in the early 1990s and played it with Saint Monday (with Dave Parry and Carol Turner); and then, when I started doing stuff with Magpie Lane fiddler Mat Green, we revived the same arrangement. And now, after more than 20 years of playing as a duo, Mat and I have finally recorded an album, and this song is on it.
The CD is called ‘Time for a Stottycake’ and you can see the track list, and purchase a copy (more than one, if you insist) from our website: www.andyturnermusic.uk/mat_andy.
The Barley Raking

Andy Turner – vocal, C/G anglo-concertina
Mat Green – fiddle
The song was collected in Hampshire by George Gardiner. It was included in Frank Purslow’s book The Wanton Seed and I’ve no doubt that that is where John and Cathy would have learned it. The notes to the revised edition of The Wanton Seed, by Malcolm Douglas and Steve Gardham, say that Purslow collated three Hampshire versions as well as inserting one verse from a broadside. The morris tune that runs through the arrangement is ‘Maid of the Mill’ from Kirtlington in Oxfordshire. The slightly asymmetrical B music is as per the musical notation I had from Tim Radford (written out, I assume, by Barbara Berry), but when I played it back to Tim he told me that’s not how it’s played for the modern Kirtlington side.

Barley Raking – broadside ballad from the Bodleian collection
A couple of concluding comments.
First, I’ve used the phrase earlier “the uninhibited arrogance of youth”. I have to say that, as a youth and, to be honest, probably throughout my life, I was far from uninhibited. And not especially arrogant either (although, as an only child, no doubt very selfish and not really aware of other people’s feelings). And yet, inspired by a love of singing, and the desire to do it as much as possible, we did somehow have the nerve to ask if we could sing at those Oyster ceilidhs. I wince now at the downright cheek of it, but we were so chuffed when the band let us.
Second, for anyone who’s confused, the phrase “cock up my beaver” refers to a beaver hat.
And finally, I have to record the passing of my dearest friend Mike. We saw each other infrequently in recent years, but I always considered him my best friend, as he had been since the age of 11. We had so many private jokes, that frankly weren’t really funny, but always made us laugh, if only because of the memories they evoked. Now I have noone to share those with. But the happy memories will live on. RIP Mike.

Mike and Andy at Dungeness, circa 1972

Week 298 – The Unfortunate Tailor

I learned this, of course, from John Kirkptarick’s superlative performance of the song on Morris On. That was a real eye-opener in terms of what the anglo-concertina can do (if you’re as gifted as John Kirkpatrick).

I’d be very surprised if John didn’t learn the song from Frank Purslow’s book Marrowbones. Purslow gives two Hampshire sources: George Lovett from Winchester, and Alfred Oliver from Basingstoke, collected by George Gardiner in 1906 and 1907 respectively. Their very similar versions can be viewed – words and music – on the VWML site. Alfred Williams also took down a set of verses from John Webley of Arlington in Gloucestershire.

The song was in fact written by Music Hall entertainer Harry Clifton, and published in 1868 by Hopwood and Crew (nineteenth century attitudes to musical copyright might be inferred from this broadside print on the Bodleian site, from Glasgow publisher the Poet’s Box, which also dates from 1868). Harry Clifton wrote some really well-known songs including ‘Polly Perkins of Paddington Green’ and ‘My Barney (Bonnie) lies over the ocean’ – and numerous others which will be familiar to those of us interested in traditional song and dance, such as ‘Dark girl dress’d in blue’, ‘The Watercress girl’ and ‘The Calico Printer’s Clerk’.

You’ll find Clifton’s words on John Baxter’s excellent site, Folk Song and Music Hall. It seems the “Oh! why did my Sarah serve me so?” verse was in fact originally a chorus.

On this Mudcat thread you’ll find both words and music, in ABC format. Copying the code into ABC Explorer reveals that, in the hands of country singers and musicians, both the song and related morris tune had departed some way from Clifton’s tune (which, in turn, reminds me of various older sailor-themed dance tunes). Here it is, in case you fancy learning a different version from that usually sung on the folk scene.

I’ll Go and Enlist for a Sailor, Harry Clifton, 1868. From the transcription by Artful Codger on Mudcat.

The Unfortunate Tailor

Week 257 – If I were back ‘ome in ‘Ampshire

I was out for a walk recently when, suddenly, a great flock of birds rose up from an adjoining field, circled for a bit, then flew away. Which immediately brought this song to mind.

It’s the last song in Bob Copper’s 1973 book Songs and Southern Breezes, which of course chronicles Bob’s time as a folk song collector, including some years spent away from his beloved Sussex, running a pub at Cheriton in Hampshire.  I can’t recall if the song is mentioned in the text of the book as having been collected from a specific singer; maybe it was just universally known in those parts.

But funnily enough, in case you thought this was a quintessentially Hampshire song, the Full English has one other version – collected from Albert Bromley of Shotley in Suffolk, and entitled ‘I wish I were back home in Suffolk’. I suppose those pesky blackbirds get all over the country…

 

illustration copyright Andrew Davidson

If I were back ‘ome in ‘Ampshire

Week 242 – Long Looked For Come At Last

I learned this from Caroline Jackson-Houlston. She and I used to sing it together – performing as Flash Company – in the early 1980s, and it’s one of several songs from that period which she and I both retain in our individual repertoires. Mind you, Caroline has always made quite clear what her reaction would be, if a suitor buggered off for a year then came back claiming “you’re the one I really want” – and it wouldn’t be to drag him off to church.

I still have Caroline’s typed copy of the words. Unusually, they don’t give her source, but looking at the Full English it must be this version from the 85 year old William Winter, collected at Andover by H. Balfour Gardiner, and which forms the basis of the version printed in Frank Purslow’s The Wanton Seed.

‘Abroad as I was a-walking’ from the Gardiner MSS, via the Full English

Long Looked For Come At Last

Andy Turner – vocal, C/G anglo-concertina

Week 226 – God Bless the Master

I learned this from the Watersons’ 1977 LP Sound, sound your instruments of joy. Bob Copper recorded the song in the 1950s from Frank “Mush” Bond of North Waltham in Hampshire. The song was included in Bob’s Book Songs and Southern Breezes and you can hear the original recording on The Voice of the People Volume 16, You Lazy Lot of Bone-Shakers, alongside Frank’s brother Sam singing ‘Where Does Father Christmas Go To?’. Both brothers were members of the North Waltham Jolly Jacks, a Mummers team founded by Frank, and which continued to perform up to about 1950. They went out on Boxing Day; ‘God Bless the Master’ was sung at the end of the performance, and if you invited them in for a bit of hospitality, you’d be treated to ‘Where Does Father Christmas Go To?’.

You can see the Jolly Jacks in action (but not hear them, unfortunately) in a silent film preserved by Hampshire County Council’s Wessex Film and Sound Archive:

Manydown Park films: Various Subjects 1929-1931
Silent B/W amateur film by Colonel A S Bates at his estate in Hampshire, England. Shows family activities and events, including North Waltham Mummers and the Vyne Hunt.

The text at the start of the film says:

The actors include 3 Bonds and all come from North Waltham. This family has performed this play for certainly five generations.

Reg Hall’s notes for the Voice of the People CD state that Frank and Sam’s father had been a member of the Overton Mummers (a few miles from North Waltham), and five generations seems entirely plausible.

North Waltham Mummers – Hackwood Park 1948, from the Roud/Marsh collection

I notice that A.L.Lloyd’s notes to the song on Sound, sound your instruments of joy say

A carol that is midway between a wassail and a hymn, so a link between pagan luck-wish and pious hope. The words were widespread on garlands and broadsides around 1850, and several versions have been collected in the Southern counties during the twentieth century (most recently by Bob Copper at North Waltham, Hampshire). The Watersons’ tune and words are close to the set found by Vaughan Williams in 1909 at Preston Candover, barely five miles from North Waltham. The song was much used as a Mummers’ Salutation, sung as an overture in front of the houses at New Year before the mummers began their patter.

The Full English shows that the song was in fact quite widespread in Hampshire, as well as Sussex, Surrey and Berkshire. My words are a bit of a mixture of the Watersons’ interpretation of the Preston Candover version and  the version printed in Bob Copper’s book (which in fact supplements Frank Bond’s words with a couple of verses from Turp Brown, from nearby Cheriton). There was a time when I took delight in singing Turp Brown’s  line “He was buried in some safe old acre”, but these days I’m more inclined to sing “sepulchre”, which is perhaps not such a memorable choice of words, but makes a lot mores sense.

God Bless the Master

Andy Turner – vocal, G/D anglo-concertina

Week 167 – The Small Birds Whistle

Thanks to its inclusion on various Peel and Kershaw sessions, Martin Carthy’s reconstruction of this Child Ballad is known well beyond the confines of the folk world. John Peel reckoned that every time Martin recorded a new session, the song had acquired a few extra verses. Well, there are plenty to choose from, even before you start making up brand new ones. There are in fact whole chunks of the Carthy story which are missing from my version. In particular, when the King goes out hunting, nothing of note seems to happen, and he comes home safely two verses later.

I was inspired to learn the song after hearing Jasper Smith’s four verses fragment on the Topic LP The Travelling Songster (that recording was also included on Voice of the People Volume 11, My Father’s the King of the Gypsies). On a trip to the Vaughan Williams memorial Library I assembled enough verses to make a coherent whole, thanks in part to the seven Scottish, American and Canadian variants in Bronson’s Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads but mainly making use of the version printed in Frank Purslow’s book The Constant Lovers. That version of the song came from Albert Doe, of Bartley in Hampshire, collected by George Gardiner on 17th December 1908. Frank Purslow’s notes say that Albert Doe was “apparently a good singer with a very fine repertoire, some, if not all, of Irish origin. The tune of this version in any case betrays its country of origin, as it is a variant – a good one – of a tune much associated with texts of Irish origin, such as The Croppy Boy, The Isle of France, Sweet William, The Wild and Wicked Youth and several others”. Jasper Smith’s song is set to a variant of the same tune, while on The Travelling Songster Phoebe Smith uses an almost identical tune for ‘Sweet William’ – indeed, I think the way I sing the tune probably owes more to Phoebe than Jasper Smith.

The song itself dates back to the seventeenth century. The earliest copy in the Bodleian was “Printed for Eliz. Andrews in little St. Bartholomews court in West-smithfield” (in London) between 1664 and 1666. And while we know that all folk songs and ballads must have been written by someone, this is one where we’re pretty sure who that someone was: ‘The famous Flower of Serving-Man. Or, The Lady turn’d Serving-Man’ was entered in the Stationers’ Register on July 14, 1656, by noted (and prolific) ballad-writer Laurence Price.  If your public library provides access to the Oxford DNB, you can read Roy Palmer’s biographical entry on Price at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22759.

The famous flower of serving-men. Or The lady turn’d serving. Printed for Eliz. Andrews in little St. Bartholomews court in West-smithfield, between 1664 and 1666. From the Bodleian collection.

The Small Birds Whistle

Week 100 – Through Lonesome Woods

It’s the one hundredth week of the blog, so let’s celebrate with a rather lovely little traditional song, with a decidedly lovely guitar accompaniment from the perennially lovable Chris Wood.

I first heard this c1981 at the Heritage Society in Oxford, sung by Andy Cheyne, who had recently appeared on the Oxford scene. Andy immediately became a favourite at the club, as he had a range of really interesting songs with really interesting accompaniments. Mainly, he played acoustic guitar, but also had one of those electric guitars with a small speaker embedded in the body – a few years later Ali Farka Toure was shown playing one on the cover of Folk Roots.

Andy had had this song from Sam Richards and Tish Stubbs’ The English Folksinger, from where I also took the words. Andy recorded the song a decade or so later with Michelle Soinne on an excellent cassette-only release Fish Royal. Meanwhile, when Chris Wood and I started working up material in the summer of 1982, I’m pretty sure this was one of the very first songs to go into our repertoire. It was certainly one of my favourites, and when I came to record an album in 1990, this was always going to be on it. That album, Love, Death and the Cossack, was also cassette-only. And, retro-fans, I do still have a box of them knocking around the loft. But if you’d like a copy, you may prefer to download it from http://andyturner.bandcamp.com

Chris has subsequently recorded the song a couple of times, with the Two Duos Quartet, and with Jean-Francois Vrod. Chris learned it from me, as he has always acknowledged, although I seem to remember he’s changed the accidentals around a little.

‘Through Lonesome Woods’ from Henry Perkes, collected by George Gardiner. Image © EFDSS

Like last week’s song, this appears to be the only collected version of Roud number 3461.

Last week, a friend’s comment on ‘Master Kilby’ was, simply, “Poetry!” . Well so is this

Through lonesome woods I took my way
So dark, so dark, as dark could be
Where the leaves were shivering on every tree
Which don’t you think ’twas grief for me

Through Lonesome Woods

Andy Turner: vocals
Chris Wood: guitar

Week 63 – Common Garden

Some years ago, on a visit to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, my search for the words of a song led me to the George Gardiner MSS. These are now freely available on the EFDSS Take Six website but back in the dark ages one had to scroll through the collection on microfilm. Once I’d noted down the song I was after, having put Malcolm to the trouble of loading up the film, I thought I might as well have a browse and see what else I could find. I’m really glad I did, as I came across the version of ‘The Isle of France’ which I recorded last year with Magpie Lane, and this little gem, which immediately became one of my favourites.

I see that Steve Roud has given this a unique Roud number; although the song has some words in common with other songs, such as ‘Yarmouth is a Pretty Town’, ‘Boys of Kilkenny’ and ‘The Chaps of Cockaigny’.

It’s one of those songs which conjure up an atmosphere, but you’re not really sure what’s going on. No doubt at one time the song did make more sense but, deliberately or through forgetfulness, the folk process has improved it. (The mystery preserved in the words adds to my enjoyment of the song – it seems to make it “proper poetry”; and I’m a great fan of Elvis Costello, but I often don’t have a clue what he’s going on about).

Gardiner collected this in Axford, Hants – a hotbed of traditional singing at the time, it would seem – on 19 August 1907. The source was Alfred Goodyear, an agricultural labourer born at Nutley, less than a mile away, in 1866 (I have this from a list of Hampshire singers produced by the Singing Landscape Project at Bournemouth University).

Gardiner listed the song as ‘Covent Garden’, but Mr Goodyear seems consistently to have sung “Common Garden” – you can see for yourself on the Take Six site.

‘Common Garden’ as collected by George Gardiner, from the VWML archive

Common Garden

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 25 – Limbo

The Rake’s complaint in Limbo – ballad sheet from the Bodleian collection

I first heard this song performed by the Oyster Ceilidh Band in the late seventies. They subsequently recorded it on the LP Jack’s Alive. I learned the words from Frank Purslow’s book Marrowbones; where I also found that, although the Oysters played it in 6/8, it had originally been notated in 3/4.

The song has been found only rarely in oral tradition. The version in Marrowbones was collected in 1908 by George Gardiner, from James Brooman, of Upper Faringdon in Hampshire, and can now be seen via the EFDSS Take Six archive.

It is always stated that the title of the song comes from the nickname for a debtor’s prison, such as the Marshalsea Prison where Charles Dickens’ father was imprisoned. I thought I’d try to find some evidence for this usage, so I looked at the Online Slang Dictionary – which tells us only that “limbo” has been used to refer to marijuana. The OED, meanwhile, has various definitions for “limbo”:

A region supposed to exist on the border of Hell as the abode of the just who died before Christ’s coming, and of unbaptized infants

A South African name for a kind of coarse calico

A dance in which the dancer bends backwards and passes under a horizontal bar raised only a few inches off the ground.

Initially I thought all of these seemed irrelevant to the song; but actually, thinking about Dickens’ descriptions of debtors’ prison, it occurred to me that the first definition was probably the origin of our modern expression “in limbo”, and could easily have been used to refer to the interminable wait [for something to turn up] of those imprisoned for debt.

And then I came across this passage from Biblical references in Shakespeare’s plays by Naseeb Shaheen, via Google Books

“Limbo” is the religious term used to denote the underworld abode of just souls not entitled to go to heaven because of having died before Christ (limbus oatrum), or because they lacked baptism (limbus infantum). The teaching is based on Church tradition rather than on Scripture. The word is used in that sense in Titus Andronicus 3.1.149, and All’s Well That Ends Well 5.3.261. But in Shakespeare’s day, “limbo” was also the cant term for London’s debtors’ prisons. Used in the latter sense, to be in limbo would mean to be in prison. Limbo Patrum is used in that sense in Henry VIII 5.3.64.

Clearly this usage of the word continued for at least another two centuries after Shakespeare’s time – the ballad sheet shown here dates from the early nineteenth century, while our song was noted down in the early twentieth century. From Wikipedia I learn that “The Debtors’ Act of 1869 abolished imprisonment for debt, although debtors who had the means to pay their debt, but did not do so, could still be incarcerated for up to six weeks.”

Limbo

Andy Turner: vocal, C/G anglo-concertina