Category: Listen

Submitted by Tim Edwards

The lyrics come from the early 17th century, and it has been described as the finest anonymous poem in the English language (though there is a theory that Shakespeare might have contributed to it). Tom in the song is a licensed beggar discharged from the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London (“Bedlam”).

I first heard it sung by Dave “Steve” Stephenson of the wonderful Songwainers of Cheltenham in the early 70’s, and loved it at first hearing. I learnt it shortly afterwards after finding the words in a poetry book of my father’s (Other Men’s Flowers, collected by A.P. Wavell—full of gems) and have been singing it ever since. Dave found the tune as a virginal arrangement in a Drexel manuscript—now in the New York Public Library.

It’s always been one of my very favorites, and for me, the last verse in particular is sublime.

Lyrics

From the hag and hungry goblin, that into rags would rend ye,
From the spirit that stands by the naked man, in the book of moons defend ye,
That of thy five sound senses ye never be forsaken
Nor wander from yourselves with Tom abroad to beg your bacon
So I cry any food, any feeding, feeding, drink or clothing;
Come dame or maid, be not afraid, poor Tom will injure nothing.

With a thought I took for Maudlin, and a cruse of cockle pottage,
With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all I fell into this dotage:
I slept not since the conquest, till then I never waked,
Till the roguish boy of love, where I lay, me found and stripped me naked
While I cry…

When I short have shorn my sour face, and swigged my horny barrel
In an oaken inn I pound my skin, as a suit of gilt apparel;
The moon’s my constant mistress, the lowly owl my marrow;
The flaming drake and night-crow make me music for my sorrow
And I cry…

I know more than Apollo, for oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at bloody wars, in the wounded welkin weeping;
The moon embrace her shepherd, the Queen of Love her warrior,
The first doth horn the Star of Morn, the next the Heavenly Farrier
And I cry…

With an host of furious fancies, whereof I am commander
With a burning spear and a horse of air, to the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to journey,
Ten leagues beyond the wild world’s end; methinks it is no journey
Yet I cry…

Tim Edwards writes: Born and brought up in Hertfordshire, my first experience of something close to folk was my parents’ 78’s of Peter Pears and Owen Brannigan. At school, some friends started a folk club and I started singing (and dancing) at my local club—Herga in Wealdstone (still going after nearly 60 years)—and I was a resident there for a number of years before moving north to Cheshire, where I live now.

I’ve been singing regularly at both clubs and festivals, and have run many sessions over the years, especially at Sidmouth Festival. My main interest is unaccompanied traditional song, although I sing a good number of contemporary pieces, including the occasional self-penned one. In particular, I love traditional ballads and lyrical songs. During lockdown, I’ve ‘travelled’ widely, including visiting festivals in the US as well as many British clubs and festivals.

Introduced by Gwilym Davies

There are many songs in the English tradition praising the virtues of farming life, such as “All Jolly Fellows that Follow the Plough,” “Jim the Carter’s Lad,” and the song presented here. It is particularly popular in the English South and Midlands, where sheep farming was dominant. It is no older than the 19th century in this form, but is based on an older song praising sailing life.

Richard Chidlaw learned this version from singer William Chappell in Tresham, Gloucestershire, hence the reference to Tresham Hill. Other versions place the action elsewhere. Gwilym Davies recorded Richard singing it in on October 4, 2003 in Dursley, Gloucestershire. You still hear the song fairly regularly in local sing arounds.

Just out of interest, here is a different version of it, collected by Sharp in Gloucestershire and sung by Jon Doran, who is making a name for himself on the circuit. I hope you enjoy it.

Lyrics

1. We shepherds be the best of men that e’er trod English ground,
When we come to an alehouse, we value not a crown
We spends our money freely and pays before we go
With no ale in the vale where the cold wintry winds do blow.
(Repeat last two lines)

2. A man that is a shepherd doth need a valiant heart,
He must not be faint-hearted but boldly do his part,
He must not be faint-hearted be it rain or frost or snow,
With no ale in the vale where the cold wintry winds do blow.
(Repeat last two lines)

3. When I kept sheep on Tresham Hill it made me heart to ache
To see the ewes hang out their tongues and hear the lambs to bleat,
Then I set out with courage and o’er the hills did go
And penned them there in the fold while the cold wintry winds do blow.
(Repeat last two lines)

4. As soon as I had penned them there I turned me back in haste
Unto some jovial company some liquor for to taste,
For drink and jovial company they are me heart’s delight
While me sheep lie asleep all the forepart of the night.
(Repeat last two lines)

Gwilym Davies hails from southern England but also has Welsh ancestry. He is an experienced singer of traditional songs, both accompanied and unaccompanied. For more than 40 years, he has been tracking down and recording traditional singers, and more than half his repertoire is based on songs from those singers. He has learned a large number of songs first-hand from the English Traveller community. He is a tireless researcher of folk song and has given many presentations on the subject. He recently had a book published, Catch it, Bottle it and Paint it Green, which recounts some of his experiences of meeting and recording source singers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Introduced by Pete Coe

“Catch Me If You Can” is a broadside I did at the time when the original recordings were released on Veteran Tapes’ Songs from Cornish Travellers, later re-released on Veteran/Backshift on CD, then recorded by me on “In Paper Houses.” I seem to remember that a copy of the original release on VT was sent to the Library Of Congress.

For anyone who’s interested, the Veteran recordings of Betsy and Charlotte Renals and Sophie Legg are available on downloads from Proper. Their tape/CD was also titled “Catch Me If You Can.” My recording of the song is also available on the usual downloads, and I’ve still got CDs available via my website.

So….in March 1978, I headed down to Bodmin in Cornwall to record family and travellers’ songs from Betsy (78) and Charlotte Renals (76) and Sophie Legg (60). I’d been introduced to their songs by Sophie’s son Vic at Bodmin Folk Club, and then to the ladies themselves on previous visits. Betsy, as head of the family, wanted to know why a young man like me was interested in these old songs sung by old ladies. I realised this was a test, so I sang her “The Banks of Red Roses,” which met with her approval, and the recording dates were set.

Vic told me that all three sisters had spent a lot of time recalling and practicing songs they hadn’t sung much in recent years. Charlotte had most songs, including “Ball Of Yarn” and “Lord Lovel;” Betsy had “Game Of All Fours” and “The Old Miser;” and Sophie had “Thorneymore Woods” and “Catch Me If You Can.” They all had several rare music hall ditties too, like “Good for Nothing Man” and “Just Beginning To Sprout.”

Although I’d met the ladies before, I didn’t record anything on the first day. Charlotte came round to Betsy’s, and we chatted about their life as travellers and as the main hawkers in the Orchard Family, and how they’d met up with and married two Methodist farmers’ sons, Bob and Jack Renals (their parents did not approve). They lived under canvas in Penrose Army tents (as used in the American Civil War!). Father, Edwin Orchard, was a shrewd business man, so when all three sisters came off the road in the 1920s, he bought a terrace of about eight houses, where Betsy, Charlotte and Sophie and families were still living in 1978.

Sophie’s daughter Viv has moved back into the terrace in recent years, and both Vic and Viv Legg have recorded CDs for Veteran. Looking back to that March in 1978 when I became a folk song collector, and after a 50-year career as a professional folk musician, I regard that week of the company and recording of Betsy, Charlotte and Sophie as one of my most worthwhile and proudest achievements.

Listen to Pete sing “Catch Me If You Can:”

Lyrics

It was early, early all in the spring,
Down in those meadows growing green.
A fair pretty maiden I chanced to meet,
And I asked her if she would walk with me.

I asked her if she would walk with me,
Down in those meadows growing green.
I’d show her flowers and pretty things
And I’d show her what she had never seen.

As this young couple went strolling along,
He sang to her some sweet pretty song.
He sang to her some sweet pretty song,
And soon he gained her favour.

Now that you’ve had your will of me,
And stolen away my sweet liberty.
You have stolen away my sweet liberty,
Won’t you please tell me your name, sir?

My name is Catch me, that’s if you can,
I’ll marry you when I return.
I’ll marry you when I return,
But I’m going over the ocean.

Now three long months they had gone and past,
And six long months he never returned.
Nine long months it had come at last,
And the child had got no father.

I’ll search this wide world, around and around,
I’ll find that young man if I can.
I’ll find that young man, if I can,
If I catch him at his pleasure.

Sung by Sophie Legg on Veteran Tapes
Backshift Broadsheets, Ripponden, West Yorkshire.

Notes on Pete Coe from Colin Irwin of Mojo magazine:

“Pete Coe in many ways represents the backbone of the modern folk revival. A fine solo performer and an energetic activist for the scene as well, founding Ryburn 3 Step, running folk clubs, dances and workshops in Ripponden and beyond, while also teaching music and dancing in schools. He’s still one of the most committed, most versatile, most important folk artists in Britain.”

Introduced by Shelley Posen

One of my all-time favourite traditional songs was originally titled, “Somebody’s Waiting for Me,” but the traditional singer who performed it best, as far as I am concerned, called it “Country Garden.”

That singer was Mac Masters, a Newfoundland sea captain I met in the early 1970s through my fellow Folklore graduate student, Wilf Wareham. Wilf’s father had been the merchant in Harbour Buffett, a fishing settlement on an island in Placentia Bay off the south coast of Newfoundland.

Old Mr. Wareham used to send Mac and his schooner around the bay every fall to pick up the salt fish made that summer. Wilf told me Mac was an especially welcome visitor in each outport, because evenings, after the fish had been loaded into the schooner’s hold, there’d be a “time” or party, and Mac would sing.

Mac must have been a splendid singer back then, because when I first heard him perform decades later, his strong, reedy voice still kept excellent pitch, and he beguiled the ear with a quirky sense of melody and changes of rhythm. His large repertoire was replete with late Victorian sentimental ditties such as “Country Garden.“

“Somebody’s Waiting for Me” was composed in 1902 by Andrew B. Sterling (words) and Harry von Tilzer (melody), two pioneers of Tin Pan Alley long before it was called that. The song’s first line set the narrative in a “concert garden”—a small beer garden or hall, usually attached to a tavern, where customers could drink and party while entertainers performed on a small stage. Concert gardens were American cousins of the Parisian café concert and the English music hall of the same era. They preceded vaudeville by a decade or two.

There’s only one recording I know of Mac performing this song, made by Wilf Wareham in the field. On the tape, Mac has a hard time putting the first verse together and finally just pushes through to the chorus, then nails the second verse and final chorus. He says he got the song from—well, the name sounds like “Martin Godden:” “We always got Martin to sing that, and he could sing it too, mister.”

The song lyric as Mac sings it differs in slight but interesting ways from the original, making it more, well, “Newfoundland.” In his version, as his title would indicate, “concert garden” is replaced by “country garden”—a concept he as a Newfoundlander would be more familiar with. And the second line’s “All were joyful and the wine began to flow” in Mac’s version becomes “Where ‘twas joyful and the wind began to blow.” Again, very Newfoundland. Whether Mac himself made these changes, and if so, on purpose or inadvertently, there’s no way of knowing.

The rest of the song’s story as Mac sings it is pretty much as written. But not the tune. Mac has an uncanny way of leaping and lingering as he makes his way through the song, shaping melody to lyric. Recorded versions of “Somebody’s Waiting For Me” by other performers (see Resources) present a workaday melody belonging to the time. Mac takes that melody and knocks it here, pulls it there, and pushes it somewhere else until it becomes quite new and altogether better. The song is already magically written in two time signatures: 4/4 for the verses, 3/4 for the chorus. Mac spins that gold into platinum. He also sublimes it into a melody that could never be accompanied by any instrument, except perhaps a solo fiddle playing the exact notes as he sang them. As with many traditional songs, this one is best performed alone.

I certainly can’t imagine “Country Garden” sung any other way. In fact, that’s the way I sing it myself now—or try to. The other day I was in a restaurant with a friend: I found myself telling her about Mac and the song, and I couldn’t resist quietly singing it to her across the table. She was moved to tears by the time I finished. It wasn’t me—it was Mac singing, through me, a grand old song.

Listen to Shelley sing “Country Garden:”

Lyrics: Country Garden as sung by Mac Masters

It was in a country garden when the fun was to its height
Where ‘twas joyful and the wind begin to blow
Stood a table in the corner where a young man slowly [said]
He said, “It’s growing late, boys, I must go.”

“Take another seat, set down, Jack, why the fun has just commenced!”
“Why, it’s only twelve o’clock yet!” someone cried … *
[Lines forgotten, replaced with:]
He said, “It’s growing late, boys, I must go.”

“Somebody’s waiting for me, someone who loves me I know
“Somebody’s wondering where I can be or what can be keeping me so
“Somebody’s heart is sad waiting so anxiously
“There’s a light shining bright in the window tonight
“For there’s somebody waiting for me.”

“I have got a sweetheart somewhere,” one among them softly said
“If she’s handsome Jack, please introduce us, too”
“If you’ll come ’long with me, I will show her to you, boys
“She’s the only sweetheart that I ever knew.”

He took us to a cottage, pointing through a windowpane
Where an old grey-headed woman sat with bowed down head
“She’s my mother and my sweetheart, she’s the one I meant tonight
“So you see I told the truth, boys, when I said:

“Someone is waiting for me, someone who loves me I know
“Someone is wondering where I can be or what can be keeping me so
“Somebody’s heart is sad waiting so anxiously
“There’s a light shining bright in the window tonight
“For there’s somebody waiting for me.”

* Two last lines for this verse should be:
“I’ve a sweetheart waiting somewhere, and she waits for me tonight
And he slowly shook his head as he replied:”

Resources

“Somebody’s Waiting for Me” is Roud #15784. Other titles: “The Concert Garden,” “My Only Sweetheart.” There is one Newfoundland entry, but it is not Mac Masters’s “Country Garden.”

Recordings (other singers):

• Wilf Doyle Orchestra with Christine—“The Concert Garden”
• Cat. #0007 (MFH #83) – As sung by Mrs. Goldie Schott, Mondell, Arkansas on April 3, 1958
• Big Country Bluegrass, Rebel Records

Shelley Posen is a retired folklorist and songwriter living in Ottawa, Canada. Formerly Curator of Canadian Folklife at the Canadian Museum of History, his Ph.D. dissertation was based on research he conducted into singing in the Irish-French Ottawa Valley community of Chapeau, Quebec. Shelley has sung at folk festivals, in clubs and kitchens, and on concert stages in the U.S. and Canada. He was a member of the close harmony folk trio, Finest Kind, who toured North America and the U.K. for two and a half decades and recorded some 7 CDs. Shelley has recorded 4 CDs of his own.

Introduced by Harry Tuft

My early introduction to folk music was a recording of Burl Ives, and on that one he sang “Waly, Waly.” Not too long after, I was introduced to the recordings of Pete Seeger—that’s where I first heard “The Water Is Wide,” and I was struck by the fact that there were similar verses in the two songs. Wikipedia tells me that it was Cecil Sharp in 1906 who constructed the song we now universally sing from previous related versions. For fun, look there and you’ll see the diversity of artists who have recorded it.

Over the years, I heard so many versions of the song, and interestingly, most of them included the same verses—no “folk process” here, apparently. And I always liked the song, but particularly the versions by Steve Goodman and James Taylor—they both “Americanized” the lyric, and I appreciated that. So, when it came to my version, I did make three changes: 1) a slightly Reggae beat; 2) I end all verses on the “four,” never resolving to the “one;” 3) I have written one verse (can you tell which it is…?).

Listen to Harry sing “The Water Is Wide:”

Lyrics

The water is wide, I can’t cross over, and neither have I wings to fly.
Build me a boat that can carry two, and both shall row, my love and I.

There is a ship and she sails the sea. She’s loaded deep as deep can be.
But not so deep as the love I’m in, I know not how I sink or swim.

I leaned my back up against an oak, thinking it was a trusty tree
But first it bended and then it broke, and thus did my false love to me

Where is the love that I once knew, that was so real, love that was so true
Gone like the light at the close of day, never to return, it just fades away

For love is gentle and love is kind, and love is sweet when first it’s new
But love grows cold as love grows old, til it fades away like the morning dew.

The water is wide, I can’t cross over, and neither have I wings to fly.
Build me a boat that can carry two and both shall row, my love and I.

Harry Tuft writes: Grew up in Philadelphia in a family that enjoyed music. I owe my first interest in folk music to the recordings of Pete Seeger and Big Bill Broonzy, and to Roger Abrahams and Bob Coltman, early influencers. I credit the Gilded Cage coffee house also as a great incubator in the late fifties in Philadelphia. I started a folk music store in Denver in 1962, which I ran until I sold it to friends in 2016, which has allowed me to concentrate on making music. I also was a member of the group Grubstake, which had a run for over forty years, dormant now.