The song praises sheep – ‘poor harmless creatures without blame’ – who provide ‘tarry wool’ for clothes, keep us warm and fill our stomachs (‘cram the wame’); it goes on to praise the life of a shepherd who ‘lives contented, envies none, e’en not the monarch on his throne.’
Vaughan Williams gives no background detail on John Mason. According to the 1901 census there were a few men with that name living in the parish of Dent at the time – one was a farmer, one a tailor, one a wood rake maker, one a joiner: locally it is reported that the singer was a chimney sweep and that he met Vaughan Williams in Dent’s Sun Inn.
Four of the five tunes collected from Mason were wordless reels and a hornpipe which he had ‘learnt from 2 old fiddlers (Bainbridge and Firly) some by heart and some out of a book that Bainbridge had “pricked out by hand”’. This second mention of ‘pricking out’ a tune – that is, writing out a melody [see 22 July 1904] – and the learning of tunes from a book illustrates the availability of music notation in some rural communities alongside the oral tradition.
The village of Dent is in the Yorkshire Dales and – assuming he had returned to London from his holiday in the north-east at the end of July [see 23 July 1904] – a long way for Vaughan Williams to travel for only five tunes. I think he may have returned to the north for a walking or cycling holiday, possibly with his friend and cousin, Ralph Wedgwood: the idea of a cycling tour in this area had been discussed between them in previous correspondence.
Mason only knew one verse of ‘Tarry Woo[l]’, which he said was popular at sheep-shearings. He provided the rest of the verses from a local newspaper. Kidson noted that the words were included in a publication, Tea Table Miscellany, from circa 1740, and that it probably originated in Scotland (Journal of the Folk Song Society 8, 1906).
The phrase ‘tarry wool’ refers to the traditional practice of smearing sheep at Martinmas (November 11, St Martin’s Day) with a mixture of pine extract – tar – and grease to protect sheep from winter cold, to nourish the wool, and to kill vermin. In 1843 a Mr William Hogg of Stobohope described how the mixture, once diffused around the sheep’s body, ‘appears in a clammy, clotted condition among the wool…it is principally this tarry dreg which gives the zone of pollution to the fleece for which tarry wool is so much hated’ (‘On the advantages of proper smearing and observations on new salves’, Journal of Agriculture Vol1/III William Blackwood & Sons: Edinburgh 1845 pp62-63). In the words of the song, this tar made the wool ‘ill to spin’; the ‘clotted’ fleece needed thorough ‘carding’ to make it usable. In this process two hand-held rectangular wooden ‘paddles’ covered in wire teeth were used to brush the wool until tangles were removed and the fibres aligned in the same direction.
Vaughan Williams used this tune in the English Hymnal [see also 25 December 1903 and 23 July 1904] renamed ‘Dent Dale’ after the area in which he collected it; it was matched with the words of ‘Hark! How all the welkin rings’, also known as ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/3/17
Roud No.1472
Next post: 27 August
