Category: Listen

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.

Introduced by Lorraine Lee Hammond

February’s song is a traditional children’s song that is fun to sing and easily turned into a game or simple theatre production. Good entertainment for a wintry afternoon. Perhaps you know a version already. I learned this one from Oscar Degreenia when I was a child in West Cornwall, Connecticut. I give his verses here, but I have changed them many times through the years. I encourage you to do the same. This song is a great vehicle for banter and improvisation – friend to friend, parent to child, sibling to sibling. A simple song of bribery!

Oscar DeGreenia (the song’s composer) and his sister Almeda Bray singing “Paper of Pins:”

Oscar was born in Sheffield, Vermont in 1878. He worked as a farmhand in the region until he moved to Cornwall, Connecticut in 1932 with his wife Etta and Etta’s father and brother. They came to work as tenant farmers on the long established Gold farm on Cream Hill. Later Oscar and Etta moved to West Cornwall, and Oscar worked as a farmhand with my father on our little farm on Sharon Mountain. Oscar had learned his songs from his mother Zoya LaClair when he was growing up in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. We have included a field recording made by Helen Hartness Flanders in West Cornwall in 1949. Oscar is singing with his sister Almeda Bray of Derby, Vermont. A Google search will bring you many other versions of the song.

Lyrics

I’ll give to you a paper of pins, and that’s the way my love begins,
If you will marry me, me, miss, if you will marry me.

I’ll not accept your paper of pins if that’s the way your love begins,
For I’ll not marry you, you, you, I’ll not marry you.

I’ll give to you a paper and needles to mend your clothes whenever you need ‘em,
If you will marry me, me, miss, if you will marry me.

I’ll not accept your paper and needles to mend my clothes whenever I need ‘em,
For I’ll not marry you, you, you, I’ll not marry you.

I’ll give to you a little lap dog to go with you when go abroad,
If you will marry me, me, miss, if you will marry me.

I’ll not accept your little lap dog to go with me when I go abroad,
For I’ll not marry you, you, you, I’ll not marry you.

I’ll give to you a dress of red trimmed all round with golden thread,
If you will marry me, me, miss, if you will marry me.

I’ll not accept your dress of red trimmed all round with golden thread,
For I’ll not marry you, you, you, I’ll not marry you.

I’ll give to you a coach and six, coats as black as any pitch,
If you will marry me, me, miss, if you will marry me.

I’ll not accept your coach and six, coats as black as any pitch,
For I’ll not marry you, you, you, I’ll not marry you.

I’ll give to you the keys to my chest that you may have gold when you request,
If you will marry me, me, miss, if you will marry me.

I will accept the keys to your chest, that I may have gold at my request,
And I will marry you, you, you, and I will marry you.

You won’t accept the key to my chest, you won’t have gold at your request.
For I won’t marry you, you, you, for I won’t marry you.

“Paper of Pins” is likely derived from the English folk song “The Bells of Canterbury.” Cecil Sharp names it “The Keys of Heaven” in his Folksongs of Somerset collection, third volume, published in 1906. In this version, the one being courted refuses even the treasure chest, succumbing instead to an embroidered silken gown:

O Sir, I will accept of you
A broidered silken gownd,
With nine yards a-drooping
And training on the ground :
Then I will be your joy, your sweet and only dear,
And walk along with you, anywhere.

Sharp commented, “From what the old singers have told me, I gather that the ballad was generally sung by a man and woman, with much dramatic action.” He collected his version from Mrs. Susan Williams, of Haselbury-Plucknett, and Mrs. Harriet Young, of West Chinnock, in Somerset.

Lorraine Lee Hammond is a member of the CDSS Board and a lifetime folk singer, performer and teacher. She and her husband Bennett Hammond live in Brookline, Massachusetts.

By Brendan Taaffe
Introduced by Lorraine Hammond

We kick off our Year of Song with “May It Fill Your Soul,” a new composition from singer and instrumentalist Brendan Taaffe of Vermont.

Composer notes for “May It Fill Your Soul:”

This song was won in the silent raffle at Harmony of Song and Dance 2014. In writing it, I wanted to create a song that reflected some aspects of the different traditions that bring the CDSS community together. Each part of the song on its own is relatively simple but together they create (hopefully) an intricate and interesting tapestry.

Please treat the score as a map to the territory rather than a strict guide. I can easily imagine other lines and improvisations that would fit on top of these four parts and, most obviously, the sopranos could change the words of their line as the song goes on.

Some suggestions: “And our love goes on and on… our hope/ this song/ etc.”

As a final note, I suspect the song will tune better in Bb minor, but seemed like an unkind key for most music readers.

— B.T.