Category Archives: folk song

Folk song 18 has variously titles including “The King”, “The Wren” and “Please to see the King”. It’s a house-visiting song, based on the old custom of hunting and killing a wren on St Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day). Mythically the wren was the king of the birds; the story goes that young men would kill a wren, wrap it in cloth and put it in a box, then take it around the houses offering to let people see “the king”. (An awful lot of folk customs become easier to understand when we factor in the universal urge among young men to get dressed up after work and have a laugh.) The song has some affinities with The Cutty Wren, which derives from the same custom; the “powder and shot” verse is very similar.

“Old Christmas” in the last verse may refer to Old Christmas, i.e. Christmas before the clocks went back in 1752. Alternatively, it may just be a meaningless one-syllable intensifier – “old Christmas” as in “my old friend”, “the Old Bill”, “old Cary Grant” etc. It’s hard to be sure, since the eleven-day discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars in 1752 almost exactly matches the twelve days of the Christmas church holiday itself; either way, Twelfth Night marks the point where Christmas is over. As indeed it is now. What the reference to Twelfth Night is doing in a Boxing Day house-visiting song is another matter; they wouldn’t have used an eleven-day-old dead wren, would they?

It’s a short song, anyway – if you’d pressed Play to begin with you would have heard it by now. Here it’s sung unaccompanied, in four-part harmony; I wrote the harmonies myself, with a little assistance from the Steeleye Span version. (I’m still finding it hard to hear harmonies – writing them from scratch is much easier.) I was toying with the idea of dubbing in a sound file containing the words “Rock on, Tommy!” in verse 4, but I couldn’t find one; you’ll just have to imagine it.

This is an old mummers’ song for house visiting at the turn of the year, marking the death of the old year, then heralding the birth of the new one when the horse springs back to life.

Well, sort of. It was sung for several years, in parts of Derbyshire and Yorkshire, by people going around the houses at the turn of the year carrying an ‘oss’ – a horse’s skull on a stick, sometimes with drapery to enable one of the group to provide the horse’s ‘body’. But ‘several’ doesn’t mean thousands or even hundreds of years; the slightly overheated antiquarian speculations identifying the horse with Odin’s steed Sleipnir – and the blacksmith who puts in an appearance towards the end with Thor – can probably be ignored. The thing is, the song itself isn’t at all old: it appeared in the mid-nineteenth century as a broadside ballad, and seems to have been just a song about an old horse before the mummers got hold of it.

But it’s a likeable song, and anything to do with mumming and house visiting is appropriate for this corner of the year. I learned it from John Kirkpatrick’s version, which he seems to have pieced together from three or four different variants with a bit of patching-up and a few new lines. Purist that I am, I took out the new material as far as possible and put the mummers’ last verse back in.

Although I liked the John Kirkpatrick version well enough to learn the song from it, I was always slightly irked by the Albionian jolliness of it, and I was wondering about doing something slightly different with it. Then I heard the wonderful take on the (closely-related) Old Grye Song on Rapunzel and Sedayne‘s album (you can hear an earlier version here) and got some ideas. My version isn’t as radical as theirs or as accomplished, but it wouldn’t have sounded the same without it – so thanks, R&S!

Three or four melodica parts, two D whistles, umpty-three vocals but no harmonies. Top recording tip: to split one voice into two (verses 5 and 7), split the stereo track into two, one for each channel, and insert a 0.05 second delay in one of them. It has to be a twentieth of a second: any more and you hear the delay, any less and you can’t hear the difference. I’ve put the song together with Scan Tester’s tune The Man in the Moon, just because I thought they would work well together.

Also known as “On Christmas Day”, but why use that title when you can use this one?

A curious song in many ways (from the title on down), this has only ever been collected from three people, two of whom (Esther Smith and May Bradley) later turned out to be mother and daughter. It seems to be of Traveller origin, which may explain the hazy geography and the lack of sympathy for someone with a lifestyle rooted in the soil. The Christianity is a bit on the idiosyncratic side, too, although it’s true that ploughing is traditionally verboten from Christmas Day until the first Monday after Twelfth Night (Plough Monday).

I got this one from James Yorkston’s recording on the “Someplace Simple” EP (which was also my introduction to Rosemary Lane); his arrangement features harmonium drones and two-part harmony, and makes the song sound so peculiar that Robert Sandall on Mixing It confidently labelled it as a modern pastiche. On this recording you can hear one voice, one instrument (the trusty melodica), self-written three-part harmonies and multi-tracking out the wazoo; I knew it was finished when the last verse started making my flesh creep. And a merry fifth day of Christmas to one and all. (Easy on the farm labour, though.)

This one will be pretty familiar, although I think there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye. It’s not as tightly written as the Maiden that is Matchless, but the tripartite division of white (divine purity), blood-red (sacramental blood) and thorn (agony of the cross) has a definite Christian exegetical quality about it, while the accompanying verses are practically a catechism. The final “bark”/”bitter as any gall” verse adds the bitterness of mortality to the list, then hits back with the redemption of souls through Christ’s sacrifice. (I left this verse out, probably wrongly, as it wasn’t in most of the sources I was using.)

As for the arrangement, I worked hard on these harmonies – with a bit of help from friends on Mudcat – and possibly a bit too hard; the effect isn’t quite as satisfactory as on the Boar’s Head Carol. Still, this was my first attempt with self-written harmony (and the Boar’s Head the second); upward and onward!