Category: Listen

(a.k.a. The Ladies Drinking Song)

Introduced by Hannah Shira Naiman

July’s song of the month is to be served with a slice of lime.

Ladies Rejoice (or The Ladies Drinking Song) was written over a hot summer weekend in Northern Ontario as Emily Adam and I nursed frozen cocktails by the lake. Emily and I were dancing on Toronto Women’s Sword (TWS) at the time, and, as I recall, although the two of us had a decent repertoire of songs, we found that we didn’t feel comfortable contributing during rowdy morris ale sings. All of the songs that we knew felt inappropriate―they were mostly about tragedy and love, and none of them rowdy.

But as we searched for a peppy drinking song within the existing repertoire, Emily pointed out a lack of songs from the woman’s perspective. True there are a few drinking songs with female narrators―but we didn’t want to talk about love and marriage or sailing on the ocean, as many other drinking songs with female narrators did. We wanted to sing simply about the joy of drinking. And also dressing up―two things, I dare say, TWS does very well besides dancing! The team has since taken to singing this song as something akin to their anthem.

I am happy to share with you a song for summer refreshment and indulgence. I invite you all sing it as well! Ladies―and gentlemen too―raise your glasses! Cheers!

Here’s a YouTube video of Hannah and friends singing Ladies Rejoice. The videographer was Christopher Blow.

Hannah Shira Naiman (Toronto, ON) grew up just north of Toronto―a few thousand miles away from the hills of Appalachia, and yet her family home was always full of the sounds from that land. Raised by a banjo plucking Pa, and a children’s musician/dance caller/fiddling Ma, her home was a hub for American roots music in the cold heart of a Canadian metropolis.

Hannah is a songwriter and a traditional dance and music leader. She released her first album of original songs in 2013 (Tether My Heart, Merriweather Records Ltd.), and since then has been actively touring throughout North America. She is a founding member and regular caller at Toronto’s first regular American oldtime square dance, The Hogtown Hoedown, and also calls contra dances and family dances regularly. Hannah’s day job is in early childhood music, where she specializes in French playparty games for primary grades. This fall, Hannah will release her second album, Know the Mountain.

Introduced by Chris Koldeway

“The Press Gang (On Board A Man of War)” (Roud 662) is a song from the days when the British crown felt it could, in times of war, “press” into service anyone whom they deemed fit. (Or fit enough.) Gangs of Navy officers and Seamen would, in times of war, scour the English seaside towns, and gather up as many men as they needed. In some cases, this was done by “the book,” and other times, by less scrupulous methods. In fact, the impressment of American sailors was one of the issues that helped us to enter into the War of 1812. The Mainly Norfolk website, which is a great resource for British traditional music, quotes A.L. (Bert) Lloyd about this song:

“Rarer than a good song should be, this one. Sharp heard it, or three verses of it, in a Herefordshire workhouse (the workhouse was a great place to find singers in his day). Jack Moeran noted a fuller version at Winterton, Norfolk, and that’s the one Mike bases his performance on. Moeran’s singer was James Sutton, nicknamed “Old Larpin”, from whom the great Sam Larner learnt a boatload of songs.”

There are many wonderful versions of this song including those by Ewan MacColl, and Mike Waterson, but I first heard it from the magnificent singing of the late Roy Harris, singer of traditional songs, promoter of folk, supporter of budding singers, and life-long supporter of Nottingham Forest FC.

Roy sang this at the Lancaster Maritime Festival in the U.K., when my wife Joy Bennett and I were there, and I knew I needed to learn this song. I tracked Roy down, asked for the words, and with his genuine, welcoming grin took out a piece of paper and wrote down the words.

I noticed that the paper on which he was writing had some typed words, and some hand-written notation to “Shallow Brown,” a lovely sea chantey, and asked whether he might still need it. Roy casually mentioned that it was something “Bert” (A.L. Lloyd) had given him, and he knew the song now, so, “no,” he didn’t need it anymore.

The words—the ones that Roy wrote out, and what I know is on the back—now hang in a place of honor and remembrance in my studio at home. I look at them almost daily, and remember one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met. The last time Roy and I spoke, we were in Wales, and I gave Roy a call. He thanked me for putting the song on my CD, and was delighted that I had kept in “his” verse: “These Navy officers…”. I asked, “your verse?” “Oh, yes, that one was mine.”

Roy has now passed on to what is fast becoming an astounding “session” in the next world. I know that I, and many others, will miss him terribly here, but consider myself blessed for many gifts he left behind. Thank you, Roy.

Here’s Chris singing The Press Gang, from his CD Called Away:

Chris Koldewey, a public school music teacher by trade, has been singing folk music and sea music in particular since his early teens. He comes from a family rich in maritime traditions, and from an early age was exposed to a wide variety of folk music during his formative years on Long Island. He has played concerts and festivals in both the U.S. and the U.K., and has led workshops dealing with a variety of traditional music forms, and accompanies himself on a variety of instruments.

Chris has had a long association with the Chanteymen at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Two of his greatest experiences were to Chantey up the anchor on board the Barque Picton Castle during his three-week stint on board her during the summer of 2009, and to sail and Chantey on board of the historic Charles W. Morgan—the only wooden whaler left in the world—in the summer of 2014.

Introduced by Kim Wallach

We dance in the month of May with Morris and Maypole, so it is fitting that the song of the month be about Morris dancing. Dancing at Whitsun, written by Austin John Marshall to the tune of “The Week Before Easter” or “the False Bride” was first published in 1968 in Karl Dallas’ book, The Cruel Wars, and first recorded by Shirley Collins in 1969 as part of the Anthems in Eden Suite.

Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter, and is short for “White Sunday.” It marked the beginning of a week’s holiday for medieval villeins (feudal tenants) from service on the lord’s demesne. This made it a good occasion for celebration, including fairs, Morris dancing, parades, with choirs and brass bands, and girls dressed all in white.

Morris dancing was exclusively a male domain for several hundred years, until the First World War decimated the young men of England. In some villages, there were no young man at all to carry on the tradition, and it would have died if not for the women who danced in memory and honor of their lost fathers, brothers, sweethearts and sons.
I love this song, with an ancient melody and modern words that evoke the terrible loss of the war not with descriptions of gore, but by painting the landscape of their absence. The women cope with their loss by preserving what they have left – the tradition of dance that would also die without the men.

This song has also been recorded by Maddy Prior and Tim Hart, Priscilla Herdman, Jean Redpath, and Bok, Trickett and Muir. Austin John Marshall and Shirley Collins (his wife at the time) ended the song with this verse from the Staines Morris to infuse some hope into the mournful song:

Come you young men come along
With your music, dance and song
Bring your lasses in your hand
For ’tis that which love commands
Then to the Maypole haste away
For ’tis now a holiday

The Tim Hart and Maddy Prior version is offered here.

Lyrics

It’s fifty-one springtimes since she was a bride,
But still you may see her at each Whitsuntide
In a dress of white linen and ribbons of green,
As green as her memories of loving.

The feet that were nimble tread carefully now,
As gentle a measure as age do allow,
Through groves of white blossom, by fields of young corn,
Where once she was pledged to her true love.

The fields they are empty, the hedges grow free,
No young men to tend them, or pastures go see.
They’ve gone where the forests of oak trees before
Had gone to be wasted in battle.

Down from their green farmlands and from their loved ones
Marched husbands and brothers and fathers and sons.
There’s a fine roll of honour where the Maypole once was,
And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun.

There’s a row of straight houses in these latter days
Are covering the Downs where the sheep used to graze.
There’s a field of red poppies, a wreath from the Queen.
But the ladies remember at Whitsun,
And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun.

(Thanks to Wikipedia, and a lengthy thread on Mudcat, for much of the information.―KW)

Kim Wallach is an elementary music teacher, songwriter, singer, morris dancer, Children’s Music Network board member, and mom, currently cohabitating with a Westie in Keene, NH. Her article about the children’s song “Jenny Jenkins” appeared in the CDSS Sings column in the CDSS News, Fall 2015.

Introduced by Jesse P. Karlsberg

April’s song is an early nineteenth-century set piece for a cappella four-part harmony singing with a name and hymn text that evoke the warming weather, “vernal flowers,” and “warbling choirs” of birds that accompany this season of the year. SPRING was published, without attribution, in James M. Boyd’s 1818 shape-note tunebook Virginia Sacred Musical Repository as a three-part setting. It acquired a fourth part, by W. H. Swan, when it was reprinted in the 1848 Harp of Columbia.¹ It sets to music the second verse of Charles Wesley’s eighteenth-century hymn, “The voice of my beloved sounds.” SPRING is best known today thanks to its inclusion in The Sacred Harp, the popular tunebook used at all-day singings and conventions each weekend across the United States and in about two dozen countries.

One often-celebrated feature of Sacred Harp singings shared with many of the other song traditions CDSS members enjoy is their orientation toward participation rather than performance. At a Sacred Harp singing every singer has the opportunity to stand in the center of the style’s hollow square seating arrangement and lead a song or two of their choice from The Sacred Harp. As Mark T. Godfrey and I recently wrote, “[t]he songs leaders choose are building blocks that construct our experience of the day.” Leaders’ choices are deeply individual, involving songs’ “words, their music, and the memories and emotions that accrue around them.” But as we discovered by analyzing the minutes documenting thousands of singings held since 1995, singers’ choices of when to lead a select handful of songs, including those featuring texts associated with holidays such as Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July, and a select pair—WINTER and SPRING—named for seasons, reflect how their “individual discrete decisions build over time, shaping the seasonal ebb and flow of our collective experience.”²

SPRING is led most frequently during the two-week block coinciding with the vernal equinox, the official beginning of spring—perhaps less the result of singers’ intentional marking of the equinox than a general awareness of the changing of the seasons. SPRING remains seasonably popular for the following two months, a period during which it is about twice as popular as during the rest of the year. As Mark and I discovered, the song then dips in popularity, before briefly spiking again in mid-July, perhaps reflecting a bit of nostalgia for the season’s cooler weather after summer’s heat arrives.³

SPRING is one of the more challenging songs in The Sacred Harp, with a wide range, complicated dotted rhythms, and a change in time from 2/4 to 6/8. The song is an example of a “set piece,” a relatively uncommon genre in the shape-note singing canon in which “a piece of music [is] set with particular words and designed to be used with those words only.”⁴ SPRING’s special relationship between tune and text is most evident in the remarkable word painting on the word “coo” late in the song, where the onomatopoeic word for a bird’s call is paired with a dramatic ascending figure in the tenor (melody), echoed by a similar figure in the treble part.

The Sacred Harp’s SPRING isn’t the only song of the season accessible to shape-note singers. The Northern Harmony includes a 1793 rollicking fuging tune also called SPRING by central Massachusetts composer Joseph Stone. It’s spring-themed verses of Isaac Watts’s 1719 versification of Psalm 147 suit its inclusion in the tunebook as part of a three-song sequence of early New England tunes arranged as an anthem on the seasons of the year.

Whether you sing SPRING, or SPRING, or even WINTER, spend a bit of time this month hailing the changing of the seasons with song.

Former CDSS board member Jesse P. Karlsberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, and editor of Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition. He is an active Sacred Harp singer, teacher, composer, and organizer.

Multimedia Extras:

• Gosia Perycz, of Warsaw, Poland, leads SPRING at the first Germany Sacred Harp Convention, Hamburg, May 31, 2014.
• NEA National Heritage Fellow Hugh McGraw, of Bremen, Georgia, sings the tenor line to SPRING on his How to Sing Sacred Harp (Bremen, GA: Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 1984). Used by permission of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company.
• Printable words and music of SPRING (2.4MB PDF), adapted from Hugh McGraw, et al., eds., The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition (Bremen, GA: Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 1991), 188–189. Used by permission of the Sacred Harp Publishing Company.

Footnotes

¹ David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 204.
² Jesse P. Karlsberg and Mark T. Godfrey, “Seasonal Songs,” Sacred Harp Publishing Company Newsletter 4, no. 2 (December 31, 2015).
³ Ibid.
⁴ Hugh McGraw et al., eds., The Sacred Harp: 1991 Edition (Carrollton, GA: Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 1991), 23.

Introduced by Robbie O’Connell

Our choice for March is a classic traditional Irish love song, “The Bonnie Blue-Eyed Lassie,” presented here by Robbie O’Connell.

Irish traditional singer Elizabeth Cronin, also known as Bess, was born in 1879 and died in 1956. She lived in Ballyvourney, County Cork and was recorded by several song collectors in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including Seamus Ennis, Alan Lomax, Jean Ritchie and Diane Hamilton. She sang in both English and Irish and had almost two hundred songs.

In 2000, her grandson Dáibhí O’Cróinín published a collection of her songs that included two CDs of her singing. Several of her songs were recorded by folk revival singers such as Mick Moloney, Steeleye Span and Christie Moore. The field recordings can also be found in the Cecil Sharp House in London.

One of her better-known songs is often called “The Top of a Mountain” or “Bonnie Blue-eyed Nancy.”

Here is a version of this song performed by Robbie O’Connell and students at the Institute of Musical Traditions.

Lyrics

How can I live on the top of a mountain,
Without gold in my pocket or money for to count it?
I’ll leave the money go, all for to please her fancy;
For I’ll marry none but the bonny blue-eyed lassie.

The bonny blue-eyed lassie, with her fair hair so tender,
Her red rosy cheeks and her waist so neat and slender.
I’d roll her in my arms and fondly I’d embrace her,
But how can I love her, ah!, when my people hate her.

Some people say she is very low in station,
While more of them say she is the cause of my ruination.
But let them all say what they will, to her I will prove constant still.
Until the day that I’ll die she’s my charming girl, believe me.

Brightly swims the swan in the broad streams of Youghal,
And loudly sings the nightingale, all for to behold her.
In the cold frost and snow the moon shines deeply,
But deeper by far between me and my true love.

Robbie O’Connell, born and raised in Waterford, Ireland, is a singer, songwriter, and teacher now living in Rhode Island. In addition to performing and recording Robbie leads tours of Ireland that include traditional music sessions every night.