Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 31 August 1904
‘An acre of land’, Frank Bailey, Combe Bisset, Wiltshire
The singer describes how he undertakes all the necessary farming activities, from sowing to harvesting, on the small piece of land left to him by his father. The tools used, such as a ram’s horn, a bramble bush, or a walnut shell, are intentionally absurd.
Still holidaying at Salisbury, Vaughan Williams took an easy bike ride to a couple of villages just outside the cathedral city on this day – Stratford Tony and Combe Bissett. At Stratford he met a carter, Mr Brice, who sang him ‘Bizzoms’ - ostensibly a song about selling brooms, but ‘bizzom’ could also mean a ‘hussy’ which gives the song a whole new meaning. Brice said it had been sung to him by a fiddler from Crewkerne who could ‘make the fiddle speak’.
After this the composer cycled on to the Fox and Goose pub by the river at Coombe Bissett. Here he met a couple of singers. The first was ‘a man called Pardner’, who ‘lived in a shepherd’s hut & worked all the summer - went to London & other places in the winter.’ Vaughan Williams doubted he had got Pardner’s song – ‘The Wagonner’ – down right ‘except for the chorus’. The other man was Frank Bailey, who he describes as an ex-soldier of about 50, although his census details indicate that he was an ostler, groom and gardener and still in his 30s at the time – perhaps his hard outdoor life had weathered his appearance.
Bailey sang ‘An Acre of Land’, also known as ‘Sing Ivy’, in which each verse describes an impossible task, such as reaping the field with a little penknife, bringing it home in a walnut shell, and sending it to the mill with a team of rats. This is in the tradition of ‘The Elfin Knight’ which appeared on broadsides in the 17th century. In that song a woman wishes the Elfin Knight were in bed with her. He magically appears but tells her she is too young and that she must make him a shirt without cutting or sewing before he’ll become her lover; to which she responds that she will do that only when he has ploughed an acre of land with a horn and got Robin Redbreast to bring it home. He declares he is already married, then disappears. The well-known song, ‘Scarborough Fair’, is a development of this tale of impossible challenges; ‘An Acre of Land’ focuses on the second task. It appeared in many collections of children’s nursery rhymes during the 19th century
Vaughan Williams’s notes for this song are particularly unclear although he gives an instruction on tempo: ‘molto moderato’ (very moderately). There are various extraneous crotchets and squiggles in incomplete bars, and for the words of the refrain he wrote ‘there goes gwine so (?) savoury’ with alternative words scribbled above and below which look like ‘goes thing ivey’. As a result, I cheated a bit and checked the words as he published them in the Journal of the Folk Song Society (8, 1906). Even in this version he included a ‘?’ after ‘ivery’. This word is the result of the method some singers used to make lyrics fit the separate notes of the melody by adding a random syllable: ‘Iv-er-y’ instead of ‘I---vy’ [see 23 April 1904 on ‘lovier’].
In The Nursery Rhymes of England, edited by J.O. Halliwell (1853) the refrain is ‘Sing holly, go whistle and ivy!’. Vaughan Williams’s version looks like the result of numerous mis-hearings handed down over decades.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/2/131
Roud No.21093
Next post: 1 September
