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Knife in the Window/Creeping and A-Crawling/Ain't Gonna Do It No More
Old-time; Bluesy and bawdy bluegrass and folk song, not widely known
ARTIST: Lyrics from Peter Kennedy: Folksongs of Britain & Ireland. Sung by Harry Cox, Catfield, Norfolk, 1953
CATEGORY: Blues and Jazz Songs EARLIEST DATE: 1903 (Sharp)
RECORDING INFO: Ain't Gonna Do It No More (Carter and Dorsey); James "Iron Head" Baker, "Crawling and Creeping" (AFS 717 A1, 1936); Harry Cox, "The Knife in the Window" (on FSB2CD); A. L. Lloyd, "Pretty Polly" (on BirdBush1, BirdBush2)
Asa Martin, "Crawling and Creeping" (Oriole 8452, 1935) Jim Garland's "Nancy and Johnny";
RELATED TO: Sally, My Dear; Nancy and Johnny; The Young Doctor
OTHER NAMES: Creeping and Crawling; The Knife in the Window; Pretty Polly; The Snoring Maid; Lay Your Leg over Me Do;
SOURCES: Time Magazine article; Traditional Ballad index;
NOTES: This sometimes bawdy song, Roud #12590, has a similar tune but different plot as the English song "Hares on the Mountain." The usual titile is "Creeping and Crawling." The song portrays a young man, creeping and crawling, who seduces the maid, then takes a knife to cut the tie on her drawers. He leaves her to lament nine months later.The Lloyd recording provocatively contains the chorus "Lay your leg over me, over me, do" And at least one recorded version of "Sally, My Dear" -- an American one -- contains the "cutting the trousers" motif.
The song was in the repertoire of Leadbelly and Ironhead Baker, both African-American convicts discovered by Alan Lomax. Here's an Time Magazine article from 1936:
Music: After Lead Belly, Ironhead
Monday, Apr. 06, 1936 Time Magazine article: Early last year John Avery Lomax, crack compiler of U. S. folk songs, arrived in Manhattan with a big, wild-eyed Negro known as Lead Belly (real name: Huddie Ledbetter). John Lomax' protègé was a murderer, but he was also a natural-born minstrel. From a Texas jail he won his pardon by singing a petition to onetime Governor Pat Neff. In the Louisiana swamplands his knife made more trouble. Again he was imprisoned, again got out with a song when John Lomax made a phonograph record of it, submitted it personally to the late Governor Allen.
Lead Belly was in Manhattan last week about to appear in a Harlem vaudeville theatre when Researcher Lomax again made news with another singing convict. This one was James ("Ironhead'') Baker, a Negro who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. At John Lomax' request Governor James V. Allred granted Baker a furlough to tour as a minstrel, visit penitentiaries in Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, sing his songs so that other convicts will understand what Lomax wants for his folk-song files in the Library of Congress.
To Governor Allred Convict Baker explained his nickname: "Wal, Guv'nor, when I first landed in de pen, I was chopping wood one day when we cut down an oak tree and a big limb hit me in de head. Dat limb broke, but I went right on workin'. So de boys call me Ironhead."
More Notes (Liner Notes from New World Records- Asa Martin recording): Whatever bawdy songs and stories were known to the earliest white folk musicians to record their lore have already been lost: little more than double-entendre (such as the Carolina Tar Heels’“My Sweet Farm Girl”) or severely displaced (Cliff Carlisle’s “Tom Cat Blues”) bawdy songs—largely modeled on black “hokum” or “party blues”—found its way into the hillbilly record market.
A rare exception is Asa Martin’s “Crawling and Creeping,” a highly expurgated version of a genuine Anglo-American bawdy song that provides an oblique view of the sexual lore known to country musicians but apparently rigorously excluded from the recording studios.
Unexpurgated texts of “Crawling and Creeping” (known in England as “Nancy and Johnny”: see Harry Cox’s recording on the English Folk Dance and Song Society LP 1004) depict a familiar sexual theme. The protagonist poses as a sexual fool who must pretend to be dreaming or ignorant while he tricks his target into helping him seduce her. Pregnancy is the inevitable result of the seduction (other texts read, “In about nine months she fell to weepin’/ Along come a bastard acrawlin’ and a-creepin’”), and punishment by castration is inflicted by the father/authority figure—often a doctor, whose sole function in sexual folklore, according to the folklorist Gershon Legman, is to punish by purgation or castration (as in the ancient “Doctor Krankheit” burlesque routine:“Oh my God, nurse, I told you to slip off his spectacles!”).
Asa Martin, of Winchester, Kentucky, one of the more sophisticated performers to record folk songs commercially, has a long background in vaudeville and medicine shows. Apparently familiar with the unexpurgated “Crawling and Creeping,” Martin cleverly suggests the motifs of the original while remaining in commercially acceptable taste: the length of the jail sentence suggests the pregnancy, the authority figure is the judge, and the nature of the punishment remains clear (“This crawlin’ and creepin’s
gonna be your last”). In Martin’s performance the usual refrain (in England,“With his long fol-de-diggydi- do right down to his knees”; in America, “Lay your leg over mine once more”) has been suppressed in favor of hot guitar breaks, among the first of their kind on hillbilly records.
Martin performed in the Winchester area. His career has been ably documented by Mark Wilson in an LP, Dr. Ginger Blue (Rounder 0034), which focuses on Martin’s medicine-show entertainments.
Here are the lyrics to “A-Creeping and a Crawling:”
A-CREEPIN' AND A-CRAWLIN' Harry Cox 1953
Last Saturday night young Nancy laid sleeping,
Last Saturday night young Nancy laid sleeping,
Last Saturday night young Nancy laid sleeping,
And into her bedroom young Johnny went a-creeping
With his long fol-the-riddle-i-do right down to his knee
He said: Lovely Nancy, may I come to bed to you? (Repeat 2X)
She smiled and replied: John, I'm afraid you'll undo me
With your long fol-the-riddle-i-do right down to your knee
His small clothes fell from him and into bed tumbled (Repeat 2X)
She laughed in his face when his breeches he fumbled
With his...
My breeches fit tight, love, I cannot undo them
She smiled and replied: John, you must take a knife to them
With your...
My knife will not cut, love, it ain't worth a cinder
She smiled and replied: John, there's two on the window
With your...
He picked up the knife and he unrest his breeches
The knife it was sharp and it cut through the stitches
With his...
All the night long how they rolled and they tumbled
Before daylight i' the morning Nancy's nightgown he crumpled
With his...
Now nine months being past, it fell on a Sunday
A child it was born with a knife-mark in the window
With a long fol-the-riddle-i-do right down to his knee
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