Old Country Life

by S. Baring-Gould

I had an instance of this three winters ago, when, at a village concert, I sang an old ballad, The Sun was Set behind the Hill, set by a friend to a melody he had composed for it.

A very old labourer who was present began to grumble. "He's gotten the words right, but he's not got the right tune. He should zing 'un right or not at all," and he got up and left the room in disdain.

The village minstrel did certainly compose some of the melodies he sang, generally to a new ballad, or song that was acquired from a broadside, or to one he had himself made. This the old men have distinctly assured me of. They did not all, or a large number of them did not, pretend to the faculty of musical composition, but they have named to me men so gifted, and have told me of melodies they composed. There was, and is, a blacksmith in a remote village in Devon, who is reported to be able to play any musical instrument put into his hands, at all events after a little trial of its peculiarities. He is said to be able to set any copy of verses offered him to original melodies.

Davey, the writer of Will Watch, and other pleasant songs of the Dibdin period and character, was a Devonshire blacksmith. But, as already hinted, these men also composed verses. There was such an one, a village poet in the parish where I lived as a child. His story was curious. He had bought his wife in Okehampton market for half-a-crown. Her husband, weary of her temper and tongue, brought her to the "Gigglet" fair with a rope round her neck, and the minstrel had the hardihood to buy her. I know that it has often been charged by foreigners on English people that they sell their wives thus, but this was a fact. The woman was so sold, and so bought; the buyer and seller quite believed that the transaction was legal. She lived with the purchaser till her death, and a very clean, decent, hard-working woman she was. She had, indeed, a tongue; but when she began to let it wag, then the minstrel clapped his hands to his ears, ran out of the house, and betook himself to the ale-house, where he was always welcome, and from which he did not himself return, but was conveyed home—in a wheel-barrow. This man regarded himself as the poet of the place, and nothing of importance took place in my grandfather's family without his coming to the house to sing a copy of verses he had composed on the occasion. Many a good laugh was had over his verses, which, like those of Orlando, "had in them more feet than the verses would bear; and the feet were lame, and could not bear themselves without the verse."

There was one, made on the occasion of some new arrangement with the farmers relative to the game entered into by my father, and which gave general satisfaction, of which each stanza ended with the refrain—

"For he had, he had, he had, he had,

O he had a most expansive mind."

The reader will conclude that the world has not lost much in that Jim's poems have not been preserved.

One very odd feature, by the way, of these singers is the manner in which they manufacture syllables where the verse halts. Thus when "gold-en" comes in place of two trochees, they convert it into "guddle-old-en"; even, when the line is still more halting, into "gud-dle-udd-le-old-en." In like manner "soul" or "tree" is turned into "suddle-ole" or "tur-rur-ree."