The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 4 (of 5)

by Unknown

12³. first fair.

13. Wanting, and probably also in W. Tytler’s copy.

248
THE GREY COCK, OR, SAW YOU MY FATHER?

a..’The Grey Cock,’ Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 324; Herd’s MSS, I, 4; Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, 1776, II, 208. b. ‘Saw you my father?’ Chappell’s Popular Music, p. 731

Stanzas 1, 4, 6, 7, are printed in Herd, 1769; the three others are among the “Additions to songs in the former volume” [of 1769], at the beginning of the first volume of the MS.; the whole is given in Herd, 1776.

Repeated from Herd, 1776 (with a change or two) in Pinkerton’s Select Scotish Ballads II, 155, 1783, and in Johnson’s Museum, p. 77, No 76, 1787, ‘O saw ye my father?’ Stenhouse had not found the verses in any collection prior to that of Herd, but asserts that the song had been “a great favorite in Scotland for a long time past” (1820, Museum, ed. 1853, IV, 81).

“This song,” says Chappell, “is printed on broadsides, with the tune, and in Vocal Music, or the Songster’s Companion, II, 36, second edition, 1772. This collection was printed by Robert Horsfield, in Ludgate Street, and probably the words and music will also be found in the first edition, which I have not seen.” The words, he adds, are in several “Songsters.”

Three stanzas from recitation, wrongly attached to ‘The Broomfield Hill,’ No 43, E, have been given at p. 399 of the first volume of this collection. Much of the ballad has been adopted into ‘Willie’s Fatal Visit,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 259, the two concluding stanzas with little change. These two stanzas are given by a correspondent[^[150]] of Notes and Queries, First Series, XII, 227, as heard by him in the nursery about 1787. They have been made the kernel of a song by Allan Cunningham, impudently put forward as “the precious relique of the original,” Cromek, Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, 1810, p. 72.

The injunction to the cock is found in ‘The Swain’s Resolve,’ Lyle’s Ancient Ballads and Songs, 1827, p. 142:

She cries to the cock, saying, Thou must not crow