Every Rose Grows Merry in Time- Cleveland (NY) 1965 Patton; Bronson 34.1
[From Folk Legacy: Ballads and songs of the Upper Hudson Valley. As sung by Sara Cleveland in June 1965 at Brant Lake, New York. Collected by Sandy Paton.
R. Matteson 2014]
SARA CLEVELAND (bio)
SARA CLEVELAND'S family background comes close to being a typical one for a New England traditional singer. Her father and paternal grandfather, both named Jerrimiah Creedon, as well as her paternal grandmother, Honnora Linehan, were born 'in Ireland and lived in Cork before coming to the United States in 1873. Her maternal grandparents, Robert Wiggins and Mary Ellen Henry, came to America from northern Ireland in 1840. Sara's mother, Sarah Wiggins, was born in this country in 1866. Both sides of the family are reported to have been excellent singers with large repertoires of ballads and songs.
Sarah Wiggins and Jerrimiah Creedon (Sara Cleveland's parents) were married in 1903. The marriage was her father's second, and though Sara was the only child resulting from this union, she joined a large family with eight half-brothers and -sisters from her father's first marriage. She was greeted as its youngest member on New Year's Day, 1905, in Hartford, New York, and given the name Sara Jane Creedon. In 1922 she married Everett Cleveland, and a year later gave birth to the first of her two children, Jim (Robert James); his brother Billy (Everett William) came along two years later. Both sons have fine voices and like to sing, a trait apparently inherited from Sara, for, as she describes it, "The guy I married couldn't carry a tune in a basket."
The socialization process which made Sara the singer she is today began early. As the youngest member of the family, she had considerable attention directed toward her from other members of the family, as well as from relatives, friends and neighbors. Included in this loving attention was the frequent singing of the many songs and ballads, old world and native American, which they knew. Occasionally such singing took on a more formal instructional character, with specific songs being repeated to her until she had learned the texts and tunes to the satisfaction of her mentors.
Though texts and tunes are not infrequently learned consciously in the manner indicated, traditional singing style is absorbed and learned at a far less conscious level. When, however, Sara strayed from the straight path and attempted to sing in some more popular style, she was brought up sharply and in no uncertain terms by her mother:
"When I was about ten I was washing dishes and singing her song To Wear a Green Willow. The day before I'd been up to my cousin and listening to her sing. She put a lot of extra notes and things in her songs. I thought it was lovely, and I was singing The Green Willow with all the trimmings, too. Well, Ma came into the kitchen and asked me who I heard singing like that. When I told her Rachel, she told me: 'Well, maybe her songs sound all right that way, but if you are going to sing my songs, you can sing them the way they should be sung or else you can shut up!' I never forgot, and you know when I hear somebody murdering some old song, I know what she meant."
Sara's taxonomy for the songs and ballads she knows are based on the sources from which they came into her repertoire. The terminology she employs appears to stem from the technical gobbledygook she has heard used by various folklorists, ballad scholars and collectors who have sought her out as one of the finest New England traditional singers since her discovery by Sandy Paton several years ago. Of the more than 400 songs in her repertoire which she has typed out in her personal 'ballad book,' approximately half are what she calls "old traditional songs," with the others referred to as "new folk songs." Among the former she includes those songs and ballads which she learned from her family and neighbors, mostly before 1950; the latter group includes those selections learned from her many friends in the popular folkmusic scene of recent years (many of whom have come to her as a source for new additions to their own repertoires), from recordings of folk singers and singers of folk songs, and from books. A list of those songs which Sara identifies as the "old traditional songs" in her repertoire is included at the end of this introductory note.
It is interesting to note that all of Sara's repertoire of "old traditional songs" were learned from one or another of ten people. One might expect a far longer list of her sources of repertoire, especially when one considers that Sara's network of relatives, friends and acquaintances was far greater than that of most people. In addition to being a member of a fair-sized family, Sara was the daughter of a construction engineer and the wife of a bridge builder, and a considerable part of her life until her husband's death in 1953 was spent in moving from one part of New England to another several times a year. Each move resulted in the creation of a new network of friends and acquaintances. Sara's repertoire, however, consists of songs learned mainly from those with whom she formed more stable and enduring relationships. She is quick to point out that each of her songs holds important memories of dear and close friends and relatives.
The great majority of Sara's songs and ballads came from her mother, Sarah Wiggins Creedon, most of whose songs trace back to Northern Ireland and the singing of her parents. She remembers that her father, Jerrimiah Creedon, had "a very good tenor voice, but he would sing a little too high, and Ma would say, 'There he goes straining his milk again.'" From him Sara learned a number of Irish songs, most dating from the last half of the 19th century. Another major source was her Uncle Bobby (her mother's brother, Robert Wiggins) who died in 1913 when Sara was only eight years old. In those few years her uncle, who worked as a lumber mill worker during the summer months and as a woodsman in the winter, taught her part of his own repertoire of lumbering songs. She recalls that he had no children of his own and always favored her, and that she learned her ABC's from his singing of The, Woodsman's Alphabet. From her half-brother, Raymond Bain, she learned a number of traditional ballads which he picked up while working for the Immigration Service at Ellis Island. From her half-sister, Mayme Bain Paul, she learned sentimental and homiletic ballads from the turn of the century, while other sentimental pieces were learned from Sam Wiggins, an uncle, and from a Mrs. Endie, an acquaintance from Tonawanda, New York. From a friend of her parents, Dan Canaugh, Sara learned a number of topical and homiletic ballads. Grandma Brown and her daughter Louella, neighbors and close friends, were the main source of the few religious songs in Sara's repertoire, and a few Irish songs were learned from another close friend and neighbor, Barney Hart.
One other source of some of the pieces in Sara's repertoire should be mentioned here. Sara likes to write her own songs and to set tunes to poetry which she and others have found in newspapers and magazines. Consciously or unconsciously, the melodies she employs are based on folk tunes in her repertoire or borrowed from country songs she heard over the Grand Old Opry or from WLS in Chicago. It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of her own compositions have a country flavor to them.
Not all of Sara's repertoire can be considered part of a vital tradition at the present time. The majority of her songs form a "memory" tradition, rarely sung and then usually from the pages of her "ballad book." Approximately 30 percent of her repertoire consists of songs which she actively sings while doing housework or driving her car, or in the more formal situations of occasional concert and folk festival performances. It is from this active repertoire that she has drawn the songs which are included on this record.
In part we owe our knowledge of the extent of Sara's repertoire to the rather common habit in many families of copying favorite ballads into manuscript song books. In the case of Sara's family songs, the first copies were made by her friend, Grace Whitting, shortly after World War I. Several notebooks were filled with songs sung by her mother and other members of the family. The first of these books was lost during the years, but a number of them are still intact and have been presented to Bruce Buckley for preservation and study in the Folklore Archives of the Graduate American Folk Culture Program at Cooperstown, New York. In 1942, when Sara temporarily misplaced a number of the original books, she renewed the task of writing down her mother's songs and was able to get her to repeat a large number of them, including some of those in the lost first volume.
A cursory examination of Sara Cleveland's repertoire of "old traditional songs" indicates that except for its size, it is the kind we might expect to find in New England. Certainly the Child and British broadside ballads are, for the most part, among those most popular in the maritime States and eastern Canadian Provinces, as well as in the northern lumber woods. However, a part of her repertoire (especially those songs and ballads learned from sources other than her mother, father and Uncle Bobby) appears to indicate that a substantial number of songs came to Sara indirectly through recorded hillbilly tradition. So little repertoire study has been carried out with American folk singers that we are hard pressed to comment on the large number of sentimental songs and homiletic pieces known by Sara. Certainly many traditional singers, North and South, knew many such songs (this contention is supported by my own field work in the Southern Appalachians and New England), but few collectors have considered these worthy of notice and have chosen to publish only those pieces which they considered more traditional. Greater consideration will have to be given to such songs before we can talk about the differences between northern and southern repertoires.
The preservation of these songs in the pages of manuscript song books is only one of the ways in which these songs will be passed on to present and future generations. Today, Sara lives with one of her sons, Jim (who is an excellent but exceedingly bashful singer), in Brant Lake, New York, where her granddaughter, Colleen, comes under her daily influence. Those of us who have heard Colleen sing her grandmother's ballads can attest that she is a first rate singer who will see to it that Sara's songs are not forgotten. And until some collector comes along a couple of decades from now and 'discovers' Colleen, we are fortunate in having this fine recording of a small sampling of Sara's repertoire sung by Sara herself.
"Every Rose Grows Merry in Time"- Sung by Sara Cleveland, Brant Lake, N.Y., June 1965. Collected by Sandy Paton.
1. As I was a-walking down by the seashore,
Every rose grows merry in time
I met there a maiden I'd ne'er seen before
And I said, Will you be a true lover of mine?
If you are to be a true lover of mine,
Every rose grows merry in time
You must make me a shirt without needle or twine
And then you will be a true lover of mine.
2. You must wash it in an old dry well
Every rose grows merry in time
Where never a drop of water e'er fell
And then you will be a true lover of mine.
You must dry it under an old buck-thorn
Every rose grows merry in time
That never has blossomed since Adam was born
And then you will be a true lover of mine.
3. You must iron it with an old flat rock
Every rose grows merry in time,
One ne'er cold nor one ne'er hot
And then you will be a true lover of mine.
Now you have asked me questions three
Every rose grows merry in time
Now you must do the same thing for me
And then I will be a true lover of thine.
4. You must buy me an acre of dry land
Every rose grows merry in time
Between the sea-shore and the sea-sand
And then you will be a true lover of mine.
You must plow it with an old cow's horn
Every rose grows merry in time
And sow it all over with one grain of corn
And then you will be a true lover of mine.
5. You must reap it with a strap of leather
Every rose grows merry in time
And bind it all up with a peacock feather
And then you will be a true lover of mine.
You must stack it up against the wall
Every rose grows merry in time
And pick it all up with a cobbler's awl
And then you will be a true lover of mine
6. And when you are done and finished your work
Every rose grows merry in time
Then come to me and I'll make your darn shirt
And then I will be a true lover of thine.