Wee Cooper O'Fife- Ives (IL) 1941 REC
[I do not know the source of Ives' "Scottish dialect" version but assume it came from his family where he learned "hundreds of Irish, Scottish, and English ballads and folk songs from his mother, Cordelia “Delia” White and his pipe-smoking grandmother, Kate White."
Bayard, collected a Pennsylvania version in 1943 and says, it was "brought to this country in the latter nineteenth century by a Scottish coal miner." Sharp collected a version in 1917 in New York City.
I've kept the Scottish dialect in my transcription. Alan Lomax wrote the liner notes for the 1941 Okeh recordings but I haven't seen them yet.
R. Matteson Jr. 2013]
Excerpts from "Burl Ives (1909–1995)"
by Ellen Harold and Peter Stone
Ives came by his interest in folk music naturally. Of Scotch-Irish descent, he was Born Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives in 1909 in Jasper County, southern Illinois. As a child, Burl learned hundreds of Irish, Scottish, and English ballads and folk songs from his mother, Cordelia “Delia” White and his pipe-smoking grandmother, Kate White. The Whites were originally from Kentucky, via Brown County, Indiana, which Alan Lomax (c. 1945) called “until recently, a folk song collector’s paradise.” He recalled that his parents began as tenant farmers who moved continuously in a fruitless search for better land. “The rich Illinois land doesn’t stretch down to Jasper and except for the bottom land you can’t raise anything but nubbins there. . . . From the time I was born until I was school age I remember we lived on four different farms. There were seven of us children,” Ives recalled, “three girls and four boys, and we always did a good bit of singing in the family.” He claimed that virtually before he could walk he knew “The Riddle Song,” “Barbara Allen,” “The Bailiff’s Daughter” “Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor” and lugubrious Victorian pieces such as “The rich man sleeps on his velvet couch, / And dreams of silver and gold, While the orphan girl on her bed of snow, / Sighs — ‘cold, so cold, so cold.’”
Okeh Presents Burl Ives: the Wayfaring Stranger (Okeh K-3) issued in August, 1941 marked Ives’ recording debut. It comprised twelve songs, oddly, not including the eponymous “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” on 10-inch 78s: “Wee Cooper O’Fife,” “The Riddle Song,” “Cowboy’s Lament,” “Tam Pierce,” “I Know Where I’m Going,” “I Know My Love,” “Peter Gray,” “Sweet Betsy From Pike,” “On Top of Old Smoky,” “Darling Cory” “Leatherwing Bat,” and “Cotton-eyed Joe.”
"Wee Cooper O'Fife"- recorded by Burl Ives on February 11, 1941 for his debut album Okeh Presents Burl Ives: the Wayfaring Stranger.
There was a wee cooper wha' lived in Fife,
Nickety nackety, noo, noo, noo
He hae gotten a gentle wife, [1]
Hey Willie Wallacky, Hey, John Dougal,
Alane quo' rushety roo, roo, roo.
She wouldna' bake, she wouldna' brew
For the spoiling o' her comely hue.
She wouldna' card, she wouldna' spin
For the shaming o' her gentle kin.
The cooper hae gane tae his wool shack,
He's laid a sheepskin across his wife's back.
I wouldna' thrash ye for your gentle kin,
But I would thrash my ain sheepskin!
Now ye wha hae gotten a gentle wife,
Just send ye for the wee cooper o' Fife.
1. Gentiel