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young girl dressed as a butterfly
This photo showing a young girl dressed as a butterfly was probably taken at the May Day pageant in Siloam, Greene County, Georgia, in 1941. It is by photographer Jack Delano. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a35609

From Cornwall to the Ozarks: More May Celebrations

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[This post is part of a series of blog posts about the song “Hal An Tow.” You can find the whole series at this link.]

As you can read in Stephanie Hall’s Post “May Day: A Festival of Flowers,” on May Day, or May 1, people in Europe traditionally celebrated the coming of summer with songs, dances, and ceremonies.  But confining our understanding to one day alone would limit the materials we can share with you regarding springtime holidays, while also distorting the historical record of spring and early summer celebrations. For example, at various times and places in Britain, where many of our May traditions come from, May-Day-like celebrations occurred as early as St. George’s Day (April 23), and as late as Whitsuntide, the week after Pentecost. (Pentecost occurs seven weeks after Easter. Whitsuntide can therefore begin as early as May 10 or as late as June 13.)  At any time between these two dates in late April or mid-June, British people in different times and places performed songs, dances, and rituals related to spring and the coming of summer, much as Stephanie documented for May Day itself.

One of my favorite collection items relating to this extended May tradition in Britain is a recording made by Vance Randolph in September, 1941, in Galena, Missouri.  The recording is of Lillian Short singing a one-verse song about Robin Hood, which she said she had learned from schoolchildren in Cabool, Missouri. The words she sang were:

Robin Hood and Little John they both are gone to fair-o
And we will to the greenwood go to see what they do there-o
And for the chase the buck and doe, to chase the buck and doe-o
and for to chase the buck and doe, with hail an to sing merry-o

Hear her version in the player below:


Randolph gave this fragment the title “Robin Hood and Little John.” However, that title usually refers to the famous ballad in which Robin Hood first meets Little John and fights with him on a narrow bridge, which is clearly not this song. Folklorist Norm Cohen later decided that Short’s song was possibly a fragment of the ballad “Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar,” but that too proved to be wrong, as Cohen later realized.

LillianShort2
Lillian Short. Photo by Vance Randolph, ca. 1940. Vance Randolph Collection, AFC 1941/001
Finding aid: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af000001

Both scholars, seeing the names of Robin Hood and Little John, were looking at the ballad tradition for other versions of the song. It turns out they should have looked at seasonal song traditions instead. I say this because, in the town of Helston, Cornwall in southwestern Britain, on May 8, it has long been the tradition to celebrate “Flora Day” with a song whose first verse and chorus are as follows:

Robin Hood and Little John
They both are gone to Fair O
And we will go to the merry green wood
To see what they do there O
And for to chase O to chase the buck and doe.
 
Hal an Tow Jolly Rumble O!
For we are up as soon as any day O
And for to fetch the summer home
The summer and the May O
For summer is a come O
And winter is a gone O

Clearly, Mrs. Short’s lyric is very close to this traditional Cornish May song, complete with the nonsense words “hail an to” where the British song, as sung today, has “hal an tow.”

Mrs. Short, as it happens, was probably preserving a very old tradition. Although a full text of “Hal an Tow” was not written down until 1846, according to folklorist Peter Kennedy and composer Inglis Gundry, the chorus was recorded as early as 1660, and was already then associated with May celebrations:

 In 1660 Nicholas Boson of Newlyn said that there the may-pole was set up by men singing ‘Haile an Taw and Jolly Rumbelow’.  It looks from this as though ‘tow’ in the 17th century rhymed with ‘awe’ rather than with ‘cow’.  (In Cornish ‘Hal an to’ (taw) would appear to mean ‘Hoist the Roof’.)

Extending Kennedy and Gundry’s point about pronunciations, it also appears that in 1660, the word now pronounced “hal” was pronounced “hail,” which is how Mrs. Short pronounces it on the recording.  In this respect, then, her song is closer to the fragment recorded in 1660 than to the more complete versions recorded in 1846 and later.

Runnymede
A poster from “Frederick Warde’s superb production of Runnymede by Wm. Greer Harrison,” by Strobridge & Co. Lith., Cinti, NY, c1895.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/var.0756

It’s also interesting that the song mentions Robin Hood.  Robin Hood was strongly associated with May Day songs and dances beginning in the sixteenth century, but this association began to fade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From all this evidence, it seems likely that at least the chorus and the Robin Hood verse come down to us ultimately from southern British observances involving singing, dancing, and playing Robin Hood in the seventeenth century. Mrs. Short’s song incorporates only that verse, and a few words of the chorus in a form close to the 1660 trace recorded by Boson, suggesting it has roots in an early strand of the tradition that produced the modern “Hal an Tow.”

Another interesting aspect of Mrs. Short’s song is the tune, which is different from the one sung in Helston.  As it happens, the tune she uses is also associated with May 8 in Helston, but separately from the song.  A version of the same melody is used for a dance called the “Furry Dance,” and is a prominent part of Flora Day observances in the town.  In the video at this link, you can see and hear the “Hal an Tow” and the “Furry Dance” as they were performed in Helston in 2012; The “Hal an Tow” begins at about 0:30, and the “Furry Dance,” performed by a full brass band, begins at about 4:30.

To be clear, both this song and this tune appear to have been in wider British tradition at one time; Kennedy and Gundry printed a version of the “Furry Dance” tune from the Cornish town of Truro, and we’ve seen that some version of the Hal an Tow seems to have been used in Newlyn. So there may be no association between whoever brought them to America and Helston proper. In fact, it’s an open question how and when this song and tune came to America. They could have come in the oral tradition as early as the seventeenth century, as some ballads and songs surely did. However, it’s also true that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially at women’s colleges, there was a great awakening of interest in May Day observances, and many young women learned songs and plays from written or recorded sources at that time. It’s possible that Mrs. Short’s version was dug out of a book by an earnest college student in the early 1900s, only to enter oral tradition and be collected about forty years later.

In short, we’ll probably never know exactly how these two musical pieces, both separately associated with May 8 and with Helston, Cornwall, came to be combined, brought across the Atlantic, and collected in the Missouri Ozarks in 1941. But that’s OK; when studying the mysteries of the seasons, it’s appropriate that we solve one riddle only to find another in its place.

 

 

Comments (8)

  1. One (or more?) of the Short sisters once visited the Folk Archive and related that one (or more?) of her sisters had married one (or more?) of the Long brothers. I hope there’s something in the files on that.

    • Joe, I couldn’t find any relevant information on any marriages in our files. Lillian Short was the singer’s married name…she was born Lillian Scott. Randolph first knew her and took down some of her songs when she was married to Leonard Short. At the time Randolph had a recording machine, she was a widow, as Leonard died in 1935. She later remarried, to D.A. Cline, so at the time of her death she was known as Lillian Scott Cline.

      Mrs. Cline was a prominent local citizen, who attended Southwestern Missouri State College and Washington University in St. Louis, and who worked at various times as a schoolteacher, a bank cashier, a realtor, and a manager at a property abstract company. She was a Deputy Grand Matron of the Order of the Eastern Star, a Masonic group. She had the perfect background to have learned this song as part of the revival of May Day traditions on college campuses, but Norm Cohen reports that she specifically told Randolph she had learned it from schoolchildren.

      There were three other men named Short recorded by Randolph in Galena: Theodore, Charley, and J. Will Short. (He also printed one song from Leonard, who died before he had a recording machine.) So it seems more likely that it was Short brothers who married Long sisters (but Lillian would not have been one of those sisters). Randolph did print one song from a Miss Louise Long of Rocky Comfort, Missouri, but it was one he took down in writing in 1928, so the Library does not have a recording.

      The other possibility is that you’re thinking of a different collection. There is a Long Brothers Trio recorded in the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Workers Collection (AFC 1985/001), which was recorded during the same period as Randolph’s recordings. It’s possible they were married to sisters named Short!

      As you know, the Vance Randolph Collection has many pages of manuscripts that might shed light on this, and as a prolific folklorist, Randolph often printed tidbits about his informants in his many books. If I find out any more information, I’ll leave an update here. In the meantime, if any other readers can shed light on this question, feel free to comment.

  2. This ditty is taught at Shiloh Museum of the Ozarks in Springdale, Arkansas. One adult ballad student wondered if “Hal an Tow” was a regional dialect vestige that would now be “Heel an’ Toe,” relevant to a dance.

    • Dear L B,

      Thanks for reading! Your student’s idea is one of the typical suggestions for what “Hal an Tow” may mean, but if so the meaning had already been forgotten by 1660. The interpretation by Kennedy and Gundry may be the wishful thinking of people hoping to find survivals of Cornish language in the region’s folklore, in which case “heel and toe” is a sensible alternative. It’s impossible to know for sure!

  3. Helston was a centre of the mining industry. The tune for the Helston Furry is found in other places in the southern part of the UK, excepting, perhaps Wales. One obvious example is its use for one of the morris dances still performed at Winster in Derbyshire.

    Winster Morris still say that their dances came from Cornish miners. The Town was a centre for lead mining, and Galena is an ore of lead which was mined at Galena, Miss. It seems entirely possible that miners from the Cornish diaspora took their songs and music with them either directly from Cornwall, or even, just possibly, via Winster!

    Chris Bartram
    Cornwall UK

    • Thanks Chris, that is fascinating and makes a lot of sense!

    • Thanks, Darren. This post is one of three I’ve written so far about “Hal An Tow.” In the most recent one, I treat the earliest evidence of the song text, from 1802. Find the whole series at this link!

      “Eve of the fattening time” is an interesting explanation of “Hal An Tow,” but it is not widely accepted. In fact, Wikipedia merely says it’s “a recent interpretation,” and I haven’t seen any site give a citation as to whose idea it is. One of the sites you recommended, which has stunning photos, proposes a completely different interpretation, that “Hal An Tow” refers to the flower-bedecked staff carried during the procession, and credits it to Merv Davey, a Cornish Studies PhD and former Grand Bard of the Gorsedh Kernow.

      Thanks again for your comment, and I hope you get to read and enjoy the other blogs on this song!

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