A brief introduction to the origins and variations of the words and tune
By Fiona Potts
Words of North America
In July of 1974 Vermont-based folklorist and dulcimer player Margaret MacArthur met with Fred Atwood in Marlboro, Vermont. Songs collected from Fred’s mother and father, Mary and James Atwood, as well as an Aunt Jenny Knapp, were the basis of the 1919 book “Songs from the Hills of Vermont,” by collector Edith B. Sturgis and arranger Robert Hughes. MacArthur was hoping to discover more about the unpublished songs and tunes. You can read more about her fascinating detective work in the Country Dance and Song Society archives, Volume 11/12, 1981, online at bit.ly/cdss1981.
One of the songs in the book was titled “Birds’ Courting Song,” with five verses, featuring the blackbird, leather-winged bat, mourning dove, woodpecker, and blue jay. MacArthur recorded three verses from Fred, two of which had not been included in the book. You can listen to the field recording online at the Vermont Folklife Center Digital Collections, bit.ly/vflc-birdsong.
Fred sang, “Well I said the little leather-wing bat, I will tell the reason that, the reason that I fly in the night, is ’cause I lost my heart delight,” followed by a “towdy-owdy” chorus, then “I said the old hawk to the crow, if you ain’t black then I don’t know, ever since old Adam was born, you’ve been accused of stealin’ corn.” Finally, he recalled “I said the old crow to the hawk, I understand your great big talk, you want to pounce and get a hen, but I hope a farmer’d shoot you then.”
Cecil Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell included two versions of “The Bird Song” in their book 1917 “English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians,” one “Sung by Mrs. Jane Gentry at Hot Springs, N. C., Sept. 12, 1916,” the other “Sung by Miss Lily Roberts who learned it from Mr. Attwood in Vermont.” Lily Roberts was not an American folk singer, but actually a teacher from one of Sharp’s dance schools in England, who came to the U.S. Presumably this “Mr. Attwood” was the same James Atwood, as the verses are nearly identical to the ones in “Songs from the Hills of Vermont” and also include the hawk and crow verses later sung by Fred.
Two other versions of the song can be found in Cecil Sharp’s manuscripts, available online through the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (vwml.org). A version by Agnes Presley of Arden, North Carolina, (collected in August 1922) was included in the book “Mountain Songs of North Carolina,” by Susannah Wetmore and Marshall Bartholom, published circa 1926. John A. Lomax collected a version, wedded to the minstrel song “De Blue Tail Fly,” also known as “Jim Crack Corn,” by Alexander “Uncle Eck” Dunford at the Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, Virginia, in 1937. Ruth Crawford Seeger included her arrangement of his version in her 1948 book “American Folk Songs for Children.”
Several African American variations of verses are recorded in the books “Negro Folk Rhymes,” by Thomas W. Talley, 1922, and “On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs,” by Dorothy Scarborough, 1925, though neither publication includes any musical notation to do with the verses. Also of note, a few verses appear (without any musical notation) in an article on page 2 of the Ottawa Citizen, April 19, 1899.
Margaret MacArthur
Remembrance
Margaret MacArthur (born May 7, 1928) was a creative and gifted dulcimer player, a folklorist, and a lovely person.
We met in 1969 at a “Get Away Weekend” in southern Vermont that was put on by the Boston Folksong Society. One of the classes offered was a dulcimer workshop led by Margaret. I was the only one who showed up for it. I had been playing dulcimer for just over a year at the time. My introduction to the dulcimer was the playing of Richard Farina and recordings of Jean Ritchie. Like them and most dulcimer players back then, I mostly used a noter on the melody string and left the other strings to drone.
Margaret played a style where her right hand defined the melody through a combination of cross picking and strumming while the fingers of her left hand danced from fret to fret across the strings to play the notes. As I was getting proficient at noter drone style, I thought it best to not try changing my approach at that time. We spent the workshop swapping tunes and tales. Her right-hand techniques had a great influence on my developing approach to strumming. Over the years we enjoyed a shared interest in swapping regional variants of traditional tunes we learned from different sources.
In 2005, my wife Jean and I had a splendid time at George and Mary Haggerty’s August Dulcimer Daze festival in West Dover, Vermont. At the festival I reconnected with Margaret.
That Sunday afternoon after the festival we sat in Margaret’s living room with her husband and two sons. We had a session of jamming and swapping tunes. She invited me to play the Uncle Ed Thomas dulcimer she had hanging on the wall. While drinking tea during a lull in the music, Margaret and I reminisced about our meeting back in 1969. What we discovered was that it was the first workshop she taught at a camp. It also was the first workshop (of two) that I ever attended as a student.
She left this earth not long after our last meeting, on May 23, 2006.
– Don Pedi
In the archives
- “Margaret MacArthur an Interview” by Madeline MacNeil, Doug Berch, and Larkin Bryant, Vol. 7 No. 1 (1981)
- “Performer Profile: Margaret MacArthur” by Scott Alarik, Vol. 15 No. 2 (1989), with arrangement “Growling Old Man and Cackling Old Woman”
- “DPN Profile: Margaret MacArthur” by Heidi Cerrigione, Vol. 26 No. 2 (2000), with arrangement “Them Stars”
- “The Silver Chord” by George and Mary Haggerty and Dallas Cline, Vol. 32 No. 3 (2006)
Broadside Ballads
The various bird-themed verses can be traced back to a series of broadside ballads:
- “The Turtle Dove,” circa 1619-1629;
- “The Birds Harmony,” circa 1680-1682;
- “The Birds Lamentation”, circa 1672-1700; and
- “The Woody Queristers,” circa 1685.
Many different versions of the broadsides are preserved in various collections and can be viewed online at the English Broadside Ballad Archive (ebba.english.ucsb.edu). They appear with a variety of similar woodcuts, and feature variations in verses and spelling, but they all share a central theme: birds explaining why they are in sorrow.
The verse about the leather-winged bat first appears in “The Woody Querristers”:
Then said the Leather-winged Batt,
Mind but my tale, and i’le tell you what
Is the cause that I do flye by night,
Because I lost my hearts delight.
Though many of the other birds and their verses have changed quite a bit over the ensuing centuries, this verse has hardly changed! Compare it to the owl’s verse in “The Birds Lamentation,” however, and we see that the verse itself might be variation:
Oh! says the Owle that flies by night,
I have quite lost my hearts delight,
But since my Love is gone away,
I never fly out in the day.
Another verse from “The Birds Lamentation” carried through the years with little change:
Then said the Black-Bird as she fled
I loved one but she is dead;
And ever since my love I do lack,
This is the cause I mourn in black.
Leatherwing Bat
- Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Peggy Seeger, Kevin Roth, and the group Peter, Paul, and Mary have all recorded versions of “Leatherwing Bat,” a variant of “The Bird Song.”
- Aesop’s fable of “The Birds, The Beasts, and the Bat” may explain how a verse about a bat came to be included in a song about birds.
- Before modern taxonomy, it seems the bat was a bit of a mystery, not quite bird, not quite beast.
- In the fable, the kingdom of the birds and the kingdom of the beasts are engaged in battle. The bat cannot decide which side to fight for. He starts first on one side, then the other, changing sides as the tide of the battle changes, hoping to be on the winning side. When his treachery is discovered, both sides want him punished. He is stripped of his wings and banished from the light of day.
Listen to the playlist
The Tune
“The Birds Lamentation” and “The Woody Querristers” broadsides indicate that they should be sung to the tune “The Bird-Catcher’s Delight.” “The Birds Harmony” indicates “The Delights of the Bottle.” “The Turtle Dove” names “North Country Lass.”
While none of the versions of these broadside ballads include musical notation, William Chappell, author of “Popular Music of the Olden Time” and Claude Simpson, author of “The British Broadside Ballad & Its Music,” have done a great deal of research connecting the names of tunes to music. They were not able to trace “The Bird-Catcher’s Delight,” but “North Country Lass” has documentation.
In Simpson’s book it is listed under “I Would I Were in My Own Country.” He writes, “The ballad giving rise to the tune title is “The Northern Lasses lamentation, or The unhappy Maids Misfortune,” beginning “A North Country Lass/up to London did pass,” to the tune of “I would I were in my own Country” (Lord Crawford, Ewing, Roxburghe; reprinted in RB VII, 168).” The tune is named for the chorus: “O the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree/Do flourish at home in my own country.”
This tune and its offshoot variations have many other names, including:
- “Goddesses,”
- “Quodling’s Delight,”
- “King Herod and the Cock,”
- “The Carnal and the Crane,”
- “Hind Horn,”
- “Star of the County Down,” and
- “Harm Link” or “The Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn”
The oldest version traced to date is the Gregorian chant “Congaudeat turba fidelium.” It appears in various notations in manuscripts throughout Europe and even in Iceland, the oldest titled “Ecbertus Leodiensis: Fecunda ratis,” Codex 196 in the Archbishop’s Diocesan and Cathedral Library of Cologne, Germany, circa 1050.
Piae Cantiones
- “Piae Cantiones” was a collection of Latin and Swedish songs first published in 1582 by Theodoricus Petri Rutha of Nyland, in mensural notation.
- In 1853 and 1854 Thomas Helmore (arranger) and John Mason Neale (words) published “Carols for Christmastide” and “Carols for Eastertide” in modern standard notation based on the melodies in Piae Cantiones.
- Among the carols were “From Church to Church” based on the chant “Congaudeat Turba Fidelium” and “Good King Wenceslas” based on “Tempus adest floridum.”
- “Tempus adest floridum,” originally a spring carol, is also the melody of “The Flower Carol,” which is discussed and arranged by Lorraine Lee Hammond in the DPN Archives Vol. 9 No. 2 (1983).
Bertrand Harris Bronson discusses the tune family in detail in his article “Some Observations About Melodic Variation in British-American Folk Tune,” published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Summer, 1950, Vol. 3, No. 2.
The shape note tune “Samanthra,” in “Southern Harmony” and “The Christian Harmony” (see arrangement), is an offshoot, as is the ballad “Geordie,” frequently called “As I Walked Over London Bridge” (see arrangement). Included here is just a small sampling of the melodies that have been noted in the last few centuries.
