Oh well, it looks like I'm the kind of person who likes double meanings, and no doubt whenever I now hear thyme mentioned in any song I'll leer like the old lecher I am. When I stop leering I'll start worrying.

Of course, no one will want to sing a song just because it happens to have an interesting history or an ancient origin, but occasionally a bit of research might improve one's appreciation, as understanding the poetry of the flower symbolism in this song did for me.

Anyway, as Leadfingers has plaintively pointed out a couple of times, (are you still there Leadfingers?) we have gone way off-topic and should be getting back to his original request for information about the melody. I have three melodies in my collection – one is from Marrowbones and another is related to it. On looking at the Marrowbones tune I can see that there are similarities to 'Careless Love'. I looked W. C. Handy up on Wiki, where it says that he did indeed “use elements of folk music” (which he acknowledged), though the article doesn't specifically mention English folk. But looking at the list of Compositions in the article, Wiki doesn't list 'Careless Love' as one of his. Instead it has 'Loveless Love', and says it is “based in part on the classic Careless Love”. Clicking on the link to 'Careless Love', Wiki says it is “a traditional song of obscure origins … the song's melody is also used in other blues [!] songs, notably 'A Bunch of Thyme'”.

Sorry about that bit of nit-picking about authorship. No doubt Cambridge Systemica now has me marked as a pedant as well as a lecher.

Anyway, there seems to be a link (no doubt we can politely debate how tenuous it is) from the pleasure gardens of London in the 1750s (the earliest we know of, though of course it could go back even further) to Basingstoke in the 1850s (or whenever Mr Marlow, who gave the song to Henry Hammond, first learned it), to America in perhaps the early 20th century. Unfortunately we don't know what tune those distant singers used so my link could be highly fanciful, but not impossible. Of course, I'm talking about mutations of the Marrowbones tune, which is what I assume Leadfingers means when he says “the commonly accepted tune”. It's a lovely melody, but the one I prefer is the third in my collection, a beautifully poignant tune collected by Cecil Sharp from William Stokes of Somerset. There are a couple more on The Full English website. I haven't looked closely at them yet so I can't say if they are variants or completely different.

As always when one tries to make sense of historical evidence, more questions arise. How did the Marrowbones tune get to America and who turned it into 'Careless Love'? Is there an American version of 'Let no Man Steal Your Thyme'? And if so, what does it sound like? And for that matter, to what extent can we regard LNMSYT as a blues song? (I expect that if anyone answers that it will ignite another fierce argument. Perhaps it should go in a separate thread.)