Seventeen Come Sunday- Brightwell (Suf) c.1972 REC
[From recording Veteran VT154CD ('Good Hearted Fellows'). Song notes by Mike Yates follow. This is the standard English broadside text (form 4) with a variation of the last stanza.
R. Matteson 2018]
When the poet James Reeves included a text of Seventeen Come Sunday in the book The Idiom of the People (1958) he added the note, 'The original of this song, whatever it was, shocked all other editors, from the eighteenth century onwards." Reeves' text came from Cecil Sharp's manuscript and includes a verse that Sharp omitted when he printed the song in his English Folk Songs, Selected Edition, 1921, Volume 1:
I went unto her mammy's house, When the moon was shining clearly,
She did come down and let me in, And I laid in her arms till morning.
Clearly, such goings on were not to be encouraged! As Reeves said, the song was first encountered in the eighteenth century when Robert Burns found a set being sung by a girl in Nithsdale. Burns forwarded a slightly rewritten text to James Johnson, who included it in his ‘The Scots Musical Museum’ (Edinburgh, 1787, 6 volumes) under the title A Waukrife Minnie (A Lightly-sleeping Mother). Broadside texts, from the 1820's, or earlier, were printed in London by Pitts and Jennings and dozens of versions of the song have been collected throughout the English-speaking world. Cecil Sharp alone collected 22 versions of the song in southern England and there are 14 Scottish versions in the Greig/ Duncan collection. Other recordings include those by Walter Pardon (Norfolk) - Musical Traditions MTCD 305-6; Bob Hart (Suffolk) - Musical Traditions MTCD 301-2; Fred Jordan (Shropshire) Veteran VTD148CD; Mary Delany (Ireland & London) Musical Traditions MTCD 325-6; Joe Heaney (Ireland) Topic TSCD651 & TSCD518D Charlotte Renals (Cornwall) - Veteran VT119CD and Jean Orchard (Devon) VT151CD.
Seventeen Come Sunday- sung by Jumbo Brightwell of Eastbridge, Suffolk. Collected by Keith Summers (1971-1977).
Now as I was a-walking out one morning,
One May morning early
I met a damsel on my way
Oh just as the sun was a-rising
Chorus: With your roo rum lah, laddie fol the dah
Why fol the lair, what shall I do.
“Oh, where are you going my pretty fair maid
Where are you a-going my honey?”
She answered me quite cheerfully
“On an errand for my mummy.”
“Oh, can you take a man my pretty fair maid
Can you take a man my honey?”
She answered me quite cheerfully
“Well I dare not for my mummy.
But if you come down to my mother’s house
When the moon shines bright and cheerful
I’ll come downstairs and I’ll let you in
And my mammy shall not know it.”
Now her shoes were bright and her stockings white
And her buckles shone like silver.
She’d a coal black and a rolling eye
And her hair hung down her shoulder.
I went down to her mother’s house
When the moon was a-shining brightly.
She come downstairs and she let me in
And I laid in her arms till the morning.
“Now young man you must marry me
Oh marry me now or never.
For if you do not marry me,
I am undone for ever.”
So I’m married now and I’m settled down
Though the guns of the war is alarming.
But the drum and the fife it is my delight
For the married woman in the morning.