COME ALL YOU WILD YOUNG FELLOWS -
Researching with
ROUD and the Rest, including the MAX HUNTER FOLK SONG COLLECTION.
After I had finished a few notes on Francis James Child. I thought it
would be more useful to follow through in the way most of us get our
information these days, via the internet.
Now that the vast majority of collections have been digitized it makes
finding that nagging little piece of folksong easier to track down. It is a good way to acquire new songs
too. I have spent hours on the Mudcat site, and for quick answers it can take some
beating, but you can trawl through forever without getting anywhere.
A recent publication caught my eye – it seemed like a re-issue of
that wonderful series of Penguin publications from the 60’s and 70’s. There was the Penguin Book of Australian
songs, comp. John Manifold; the American version from Allan Lomax,
and the English one from Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L.Lloyd. There may have been others but these are the
ones sitting in my library, and they have each yielded me a treasure trove of
songs..
‘The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs has Steve Roud and Julia Bishop as compilers, published, of course,
by Penguin. If, like me, you have been
following ‘A Folksong a Day’ on the net, from the work of Jon Boden of Bellowhead, UK, or one
of the copyists, like John Thompson of Brisbane, you may have noted certain
references to ROUD numbers. Steve Roud deserves an introduction: –
The Roud Folksong Index has 143,000
references to songs that have been collected from Oral Tradition in the English
Language from all over the world. It is
a work in progress. It can be searched in many ways, the title, the singer, geog. location,
the source e.g. Mss/sound/ and other relevant facts, including Child numbers. It is hosted by the English Folk Dance and
Song society, and lodged with the Ralph Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Having got that far, if you are patient
enough, you enter in what you know of the song, for instance ‘Barbara
Allen’ which calls forth 1,020 records.
You further refine your search by, location perhaps, for instance, only
Scottish versions, and so on.
What I had wanted to do was search for a song collected by Rob Willis
from Carrie Milliner, about fifteen years ago.
It was a version of ‘Maria and the Red Barn’, a classic
English murder mystery. The Roud index was very comprehensive, and I finally got there,
but the whole system I found very trigger happy, and frankly cumbersome.
By contrast, try calling up the MAX HUNTER FOLKSONG COLLECTION, Missouri State University,
Ed. Dr. M .F. Murray. This one was
pointed out by Ruth Hazelton or Kate Burke, (such a clever duo) alas! I
can’t remember which of them did it.
When I was about fifteen years old I was walked home from a party by a
connection of my hosts. He was in the
Merchant Navy, so a traveller by profession. As we walked along he taught me the words of
a song he knew to be American – a really strange song, but
captivating. ‘Old Bangham and the Boar’
Old Bangham would a hunting ride, Dillum, Down, Dillum.
Old Bangham would a hunting ride, Dillum Down.
Old Bangham would a hunting ride, sword and
pistol by his side
Cubby Quee, Cuddle Down, Quilly, Quo, Qum.
Old Bangham
goes to the wild boar’s den, where he found the bones of a 1,000
men. After a few stanzas, Old Bangham did you win or lose, and did you gain your pair of
shoes.
Plus the enigmatic chorus lines after each verse.
Over the years I had tracked it down to a version of Sir Lionel and the
Boar, Child no. 18,
but the connection between the ‘original’ ballad and
the song I had learned, seemed remote.
Enter the MAX HUNTER FOLK SONG COLLECTION including Child Ballads, from
Missouri State University. Not only did I connect, pretty well
instantly, but I was able to listen to the old singer it had been collected
from. Old Bangham
was there, almost identical, with hundreds of years and thousands of miles in
between. It was there with the click of
a mouse.
That’s Pure Fairy Dust folks!.
SEA SHANTIES.
ORIGINS.
Researched and written by Carole Garland, for the Maritime Museum, Newcastle.
Shanties are not songs for fun or feeling, but are sung as an aid to muscular effort. As one commentator described: They are ‘grunt and haul’ worksongs.
The ones that sailors used for diversion in their few leisure moments were called ‘Forebitters, so called because the singer sat on the iron bitts, with the crew sprawled around. Other diversions included dances, often known as ’hornpipes’ where the dancer used only about one square yard of space, with the deck often sanded to make a nice shuffling noise. Instruments favoured were fiddles and whistles, with the concertina as a later arrival. The songs they sang were fairly typical folksongs, but the subjects included, bad bosses, grim weather, notable pubs the world wide, and plenty of willing maidens.
Chants for work are really quite old. They are usually geared to the rhythm of the work. Examples that spring to mind are the tweedmaking (or waulkin) songs of the Hebrides, and those superlative chants of the negro convict gangs, from which skiffle, blues and country and western music all owe their origin, at least in part.
SAILING BACKGROUND.
Sea Shanties were used when the merchant ships were sailing to the far points of the earth under the six sail rig that Vasco Da Gama had carried. They were bluff, pot bellied craft, few of more than 300 tons, except for the big East Indiamen. Stubbornly conservative in design, these big ships, like the Bombay Castle, launched in 1789, carried 74 guns. A ship laden with goods was a great prize and had to be able to defend itself. These ships, like the Royal Navy, were ‘silent’ ships, and work effort was co-ordinated with whistles, or sometimes with drumbeats.
The early Merchantmen, with their monopolies on certain trades, had no great impulse to improve in design. Merchants were resigned to the slowness of transport . From Liverpool to Philadelphia, sixty days there, fifty back. Seventy days from Kingston, Jamaica, to London. Five weeks sailing from Liverpool to Marseille.
IMPETUS FOR CHANGE.
By the beginning of the 19th Century the War of Independence had left the Americas without a Navy but keen to trade. They had plenty of resources and no obsolete shipbuilding laws as the British had. In the yards close to Baltimore they evolved big, fast frigates, brigs and schooners of novel design – flush decked with the point of maximum beam well for’ard. Plenty of sheer from high bows to low stern, and a pronounced rake to the masts. Later this design was adapted to slave ships, privateers and eventually, to ordinary merchantmen.
In Britain, meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was gathering pace. Those merchants, ironmasters and textile manufacturers had no patience with the established way of doing things. They wanted access to the world’s markets, and they had to compete with fast American ships.
In 1816, Isaac Wright and Co.’s Blackball line began their regular run between Liverpool and New York, sailing on the first of the month regardless of
weather, doing it in 23 days for the eastward trip and 40 back. The discipline was merciless and they employed the hardest of skippers whose cruelty was legendary. On the other hand one shanty ‘Hooraw for the Blackball Line’ proves that sailors took pride in their accomplishments, being the ‘hard’ men of the sea.
Within a short time others were following suit, but the packet ships were still quite small vessels, and their design resistant to change.
THE FIRST CLIPPER SHIPS
In 1845 John Griffiths designed the first large clipper ship, The Rainbow, of 750 tons. Many felt she was unseaworthy, but she made her fast maiden voyage round the Horn from New York to Canton and back, in six and a half months.
The discovery of gold on the West coast of America increased the trade. Within four years after 1848 nearly 160 ships were built to that design, ( although crews for the trip back were often hard to find, and lead to some unsavoury practices in the area of civil liberties).
DECLINE OF THE CLIPPER SHIPS.
The American ships were built of soft woods like spruce and pine, and it was not long before the stresses of hard sailing strained the quality of these ships, and they deteriorated quite rapidly. The British ships, however, were built of hard woods such as teak and oak. Though more expensive initially they were cheaper in the long run. By the eighteen-sixties the American ships were virtually out of the running. In any case the wooden, sail driven ships were becoming obsolete. The new iron ships had sails and steam, but by 1875 the clippers were scuffling for a living – the days of the sea shanty were over.
THE SEA SHANTY AT WORK.
It ws in the early eighteen hundreds, with pressure of deadlines building within the great merchant lines, that the worth of a Shantyman finally came to be recognised. It was said that a ‘good shantyman was worth six more hands on a rope’, and some companies paid extra for a man with a good strong voice and a ready wit for spinning chants out of his head. The practice of shantysinging as we know it best, emerged in the days of the American packet ships of 1830 -1850, and reached its peak in the British dominated clipper ship days roughly 1855- 1870.
THE CREWS
It would be impossible to define exactly which shanties were British and which, American. They were changed effortlessly to fit the crew at the time, including the destination, the weather, and certain observations on the skipper. Although the British ships were largely crewed by British sailors (there being a large population of men brought up within reach of a coastline) those of the American ships were crewed by a very mixed bag, since native born Americans were not very numerous. Others were attracted by the higher wages paid on American ships. Many black Africans liked the life, and brought, like the Welsh, the only harmonies used. Otherwise shanties were done in plainsong, encrusted with a fine jumble of stage hits, country songs and bits of African culture.
MEET FRANCIS JAMES CHILD AND HIS BALLADS.
(ALL 305 OF THEM)
Francis James Child is sometimes called the Father of Folksong, because his life’s work was the astonishing 5 volume book set called the ‘English and Scottish Popular Ballads’. Published from 1884 onwards, this collection has become the standard reference text for anyone interested in folksong. Many singers will give a Child reference number, and this is often the listener’s first introduction to ballad or song history.
He was American, born in 1825, and died in 1896. He tirelessly gathered together all the old collections of the day, including a huge collection from Sir Walter Scott. He tracked variants of these, most famously to the Appalachian Mountains in America, where those old ballads had huge value as stories in otherwise bleak lives.
Like the game of ‘whispers’ , ballad themes were misheard, altered to provide new place names, or the Lord/Lady characters were ‘commonised’ – demoted to suit ideas of a more egalitarian society.
Child reference numbers are like the Head of the household. After the number, each theme develops and small changes are tracked. If the family likeness is only remote they come under a different section, but are further arranged by geographical and probable age.
Francis James Child would perhaps be surprised by the uses his texts have been put to. He was not a musicologist but rather what we would call these days a Philologist – a historian of language and poetry. He tracked themes across many countries, including Scandinavia, the Slavic and Baltic countries, America and the rest of Europe. The tunes did not really interest him, and it was left to Charles Bronson to publish a guide to the tunes of the Child Ballads in 1972, recently back in print (but very pricey)
Let’s Look at some.
The essential nugget-y theme of a ballad is likely to survive any incarnation. Who has not heard lines like:-
‘I gave my love a cherry’ (1) or ‘Hangman stay thy hand/ I think I hear my father a coming…..’ (2) or ‘Who will shoe your pretty little foot’ (3) or ‘Tell her to make me a cambric shirt.’ (4)
These phrases turn up everywhere, but they turn up first in the original ballad and act like DNA. Sometimes only the juicy bits are adopted. ‘The Elfin Knight’ was written about in 1770 and that is not nearly as old as most. The Scarborough Fair version makes no mention of the fact that if she gets the answers wrong he will steal away her soul. The cambric shirt is a bit of a distraction.
The curious thing about these ancient songs is this:-
The same wellspring of migrants landed in America as well as Australia. Maybe America got them a little earlier. However since the songs never stopped being sung except comparatively recently, why is it that the Americas have so rich, so widespread, and so varied a collection? Canada has too, and Lord Lovell, one of my favourite ballads is Canada’s most loved one too.
I have searched several Australian folksong collections and found only dubious traces of two (and I have since lost one of them) In Charters Towers in 1969, a song was collected which is fairly obviously The Twa Corbies, which becomes the Three Crows. They still ask each other where they will dine; instead of a dead Knight they have an old mare, They still perch on the backbone and peck out its eyes. It is a variant of Child no. 26
The obvious answer to my own question is that Australian Collectors were selecting from their singers only those songs that bore no traces of Englishness, which is a terrible pity. As Francis James Child found, those ballads come from everywhere and simply found a good harbouring in the British Isles. Instead, we in Australia, have few original songs for women, and men’s songs are repetitious to say the least. Possibly we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Maybe those old magical songs WERE collected, and they will turn up one day, but by suppressing them, they have lost the capacity to evolve and enrich our local songstock in a purely Australian way. I wonder what they would be like.
Carole Garland, July 15, 2012
(1) “I gave my love a cherry” is from Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship. Child #46
(2) ‘Maid Freed From the Gallows’ Child#95
(3) ‘The Lass of Roch Royal’ aka Lord Gregory. Child# 76
(4) ‘The Elfin Knight’ aka Scarborough Fair. Child#2.
