Does "Barley Mow" rhyme with "how" or "hoe"?
Here's the Traditional Ballad Index entry on this song: Barley Mow, The DESCRIPTION: Cumulative song toasting successive sizes of drinking vessels, and those who serve them: "The quart pot, pint pot, half-a-pint, gill pot, half-a-gill, quarter-gill, nipperkin, and the brown bowl/Here's good luck, good luck, good luck to the barley mow."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1609 (Ravenscroft's Deuteromelia, under the title "Give Us Once a Drinke")
KEYWORDS: ritual drink nonballad
FOUND IN: Britain(England(Lond,South,West)) Australia
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Sharp-100E 99, "The Barley Mow" (1 text, 1 tune)
Williams-Thames, pp. 289-290, "The Barley-Mow Song" (1 text) (also Wiltshire-WSRO Wt 389)
Meredith/Anderson, pp. 70-71, "The Barley-Mow" (1 text, 1 tune)
Dixon-Peasantry, Song #8, pp. 177-178, "The Mow" (1 text); Song #9, pp. 178-182,246, "The Barley-Mow Song"; p. 246, "Barley-Mow Song, (Suffolk version)" (3 texts)
Bell-Combined, pp. 379-382, "The Barley-Mow Song" (1 text plus an excerpt)
Kennedy 265, "The Barley Mow" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, BARLEYMO
Roud #944
RECORDINGS:
George Spicer, "The Barley Mow" (on Voice13)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
Good Luck to the Barley Mow
NOTES: The brown bowl is to get sick into.
Sharp cites a reference noting that this was sung after a pre-Christian ritual called "crying the neck". -PJS
It was my understanding (don't know where I heard it) that the "Barley Mow" was a challenge -- if you fail to sing it through accurately and/or in one breath, you have to take another drink and, perhaps, buy a round for the house. Naturally, things tend to go downhill rapidly after the first error.
Ravenscroft's version of this is fascinating, since the final words are not "barley mow" but "balla moy," which (depending on the language) could mean something like "throw to me." Even the English version has its archaic words -- the chorus runs
The Tunne, the Butt, the Pipe, the hogshead, the barrell, the kilderkin, the verkin, the gallon pot, the pottle pot, the quart pot, the pint pot,
for and the blacke bole, sing gentle Butler balla moy,-
And, yes, a pottle is a half gallon. But I know that only because of an Isaac Asimov science essay which sneered at it. RBW
Wiltshire-WSRO Wt 389 omits the "peck" verse between verses 8 and 9. - BS
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File: ShH99
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