North Riding Hiring Song- (York) 1886 Kidson
[From Leeds Mercury Supplement; reprinted in an article by Roy Palmer in Folk Music Journal - Volume 5, Issues 1-3 - Page 154, 1985. Roy Palmer's notes follow.
R. Matteson 2017]
Armed with a wide knowledge culled from his own material and also from the books of friends and those in public collections, Kidson embarked in 1886 on a series of articles which ran for thirty-two issues in the Leeds Mercury Supplement. The subject matter ranged from ballad operas to sea songs, and from 'Auld Lang Syne' to 'God Save the Queen'. Kidson drew mainly on printed sources, though he also referred to manuscripts. On a few occasion the oral tradition came to the fore. Kidson approached it with diffidence. Of 'Peggy Roy' and 'The Goose and the Gander' he wrote that they 'must claim the indulgence of the reader more upon the merit of the airs than by any intrinsic worth which the words possess'. He believed the singing of such songs to be merely a survival from the past: 'They may serve . . . as illustrations of the kind of ditty which used to be sung with great gravity at country social gatherings before railways and cheap trips brought the latest music-hall effusions into rural districts'. The gatherings he had in mind were such things as harvest homes, and it was at one of these, at Brough, Westmorland, that a friend of his had heard 'Peggy Roy' forty years previously. The friend is identified as the delightfully named Washington Teasdale in Traditional Tunes, where the song appears, with the addition of six verses from a chapbook, and the title changed to 'The Brewer Laddie'. 'The Goose and the Gander', described with heavy sarcasm as a 'delectable effusion', was reprinted in the same book.
A song from another kind of gathering was sent to Kidson by a correspondent, a Mr W. Parkin, of Eastbourne, Darlington, who explained: 'I caught the ditty (words and tune) from a companion- a youth from Pickering - who informed me he had often heard it in the streets of his native town during the hiring fairs.'
North Riding Hiring Song- sung by a youth from Pickering, East Riding, Yorkshire, 1886
'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
Where are you going, my hon-ey?
She answered me right cheer-i-ly:
'Oh, an er-rand for my mam-my.'
With my too - ral oo - ral ay.
'How old are you my pretty maid?
How old are you, my honey?'
She answered me right cheerily:
'Oh, I'm seventeen come Sunday'.
'Will you go with me, my pretty maid?
Will you go with me, my honey?'
She answered me right cheerily:
'Oh, I dursn't for my mammy'.
Kidson printed the song in the Leeds Mercury Supplement with the comment: 'It is one of those inedited songs which have floated down traditionally for many years. Much too light and simple in general to find their way into print, they are fast dying out, and will soon be totally forgotten'. In fact the song, 'Seventeen Come Sunday', is neither light nor particularly simple, nor, since it appeared on broadsides, 'inedited'. Kidson had a copy himself, issued by Bebbington of Manchester, which he reprinted in I906 in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (hereafter the Journal), omitting these two verses:
If you will come to my mammy's house
When the moon shines bright and clearly,
I'll come down and let you in,
My Mammy shall not hear me.
I went to her mammy's house
When the moon so bright was shining;
She came down and let me in
And I lay in her arms till morning.