Two Morris Dances

On this recording [EFDSS RPL 1113[P.R.303] (n.d. 1958?) Kenworthy Schofield plays the Pipe and Tabor.  The recording is made up of the two tunes, Rigs of Marlow and Bean Setting.

Rigs of Marlow

Duration: 1 min. 49 sec.

Bean Setting

Duration: 2 min. 7 sec.

Rigs of Marlow.

The earliest appearance of the tune is in Walsh’s Caledonian Country Dances (1733), 34. “Aird Selections, II” (1782), 8 (no. 21), as Rakes of Mallo; “Kerr’s Merry Melodies, III.41” (no.371); “Kerr’s Caledonian Coll.” 16; Moffat “Minstrelsy of Ireland” (1897), 21; O’Neill “Music of Ireland” (1903), 341, no. 1814; Raven “English Country Dance Tunes” (1984), 169. It appears as Romping Molly in Shaw’s “Cowboy Dances” (1943).

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This is in Karpeles & Schofield, “A Selection of 100 English Folk Dance Airs” (1951) 33 (in schottische style, featuring the Scottish snap). It is actually the Irish air Rakes of Mallow (Na Racairide Ua Mag-Ealla). T. Crofton Croker quotes the words of the original song in “The Popular Songs of Ireland” (1839; ed. of 1886, 249), of which the first verse is as follows:—

Beauing, belling, dancing, drinking,
Breaking windows, damning, sinking,
Ever raking, never thinking,
Live the rakes of Mallow.

 The song was to be sung to ‘Sandy lent the man his mill’, according to Croker, who expurgated one line and deleted one verse. It occurs in The Charmer, 3rd. ed., 1765, where it is given in eight line verses, which fits the whole tune. The tune is among several “Scots” ones in the overture to the Arnolds’ comic opera Auld Robin Gray, and earlier in another comic opera.

[Sharp-MacIlwaine (1912, pp. 36-37):]
This air is printed in “Burke Thumoth’s collection of Irish Airs” (1720), in Holden’s “Old Irish Tunes” (1806), and in “Songs of Ireland,” p. 164 (Boosey).
Mr. Kimber [Billy Kimber Jr., who played concertina and, as a young man, also danced for the Headington and Bampton Morris, learnt the tunes from his father] could only give us the first stanza of the Headington song, which, it will be seen, is quite different from the Irish words:

When I go to Marlow Fair
With the ribbons in my hair,
All the boys and girls declare,
Here comes the rigs o’ Marlow.

Mallow is in County Cork, on the river Blackwater between Limerick and Cork City, and was a fashionable watering-place in the eighteenth century, when it was known as the “Irish Bath” [the city of Bath, in England, was famous as a spa]. Croker says that the young men of that fashionable water-drinking town were proverbially called “the rakes of Mallow,” and he adds: “A set of pretty pickles they were, if the song descriptive of their mode of life, here recorded after the most delicate oral testimony, is not very much over-coloured.”

Neither the Oxfordshire nor the Gloucestershire Morris-men, from both of whom we recovered this tune, had probably heard of “Mallow”; it was natural enough, therefore, to substitute “Marlow” [in Buckinghamshire], which, of course, they know very well.

The “Sandy’s Mill” song is in the Herd MSS. (ed. Hecht), 204 (no. LXXXVI), 2×4 lines:

“Sandy,” quo he, “lend me yer mill,”
“Sandy,” quo he, “lend me yer mill,”
“Sandy,” quo he, “lend me yer mill,”
“Lend me yer mill,” quo Sandy.

Sandy lent the man his mill,
And the man gat a len o Sandy’s mill,
And the mill that was lent was Sandy’s mill,
And the mill belanged tae Sandy.

 (Here from Montgomerie Sandy Candy (1948), 158 (#291).

Hans Hecht compares “Sandy he belongs to the mill” in Northall English Folk Rhymes, 366. Cf. Rymour Club Misc II (1912-19), 70, from Kingarth, Bute:

Sandy he belongs to the mill,
And the mill belongs to Sandy,
He sold his mill for the price o’ a gill,
And the mill’s no longer Sandy’s.

Gatherer 142 (+ m.) 6×4 lines, begins “If ye’ve been up ayont Dundee”; see NG’s note, 150.

Bean Setting.

In Karpeles & Schofield 100 English Folk Dance Airs, 32.

 

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Dr. Robert Kenworthy Schofield (1901-1960) first became involved in English folk music and folk dance during the Peace Day celebrations of 1918, at the end of the First World War (1914-1918). At Cambridge University he joined the local branch of the English Folk Dance Society (EFDS) and became a founder member of “The Travelling Morrice”. It was on Morris tours in the Cotswold that he met some of the surviving traditional dancers and musicians. His notes about these encounters can be found in the EFDS Journals for 1928, 1930 and 1934. Later he was one of those responsible for the formation of “The Morris Ring”. Outside his music Dr. Schofield was a physicist who, after leaving Cambridge, worked at the Rothamsted Research Station in St. Albans. He was the author of a number of scientific papers.