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Brian Peters Origins:Bad Husband's Folly, or Poverty Made Known (5) RE: Origins:Bad Husband's Folly, or Poverty Made Known 15 Sep 20


Joe, this isn't the same piece as the 'Wild Rover' precursor, which has he subtitle 'The Bad Husband's return from his Folly. The broadside facsimile and transcription are on the EBBA site:

The Bad Husband's Folly

There were a number of these 'Bad Husband' alehouse ballads prined in the late 17th century. Here's what I wrote in my article on the history of 'The Wild Rover' for the 2015 Folk Music Journal:

‘Alehouse ballads’ flourished during the seventeenth century. Some of the earliest examples are found in the first volume of Samuel Pepys’s collection, which includes a section devoted to ‘Drinking and Good Fellowship’ – a ‘good fellow’ in this context being a drinking companion. Although conviviality is a recurring theme, the dangers of profligate consumption are signalled: in A Goodfellowes Complaint against Strong Beere, the drinker, who ‘once enjoyed both house and land’, is forced to rely on the pawnshop to keep him from ruin, while the previously welcoming tapster is now ‘like to thrust me out of doore’.

The last three decades of the century saw further developments of this theme with the publication of a dozen or more ‘bad husband’ ballads, in which the errant spouse wastes his money in the alehouse, leaves his family destitute, and abuses his wife verbally, or physically, before seeing the error of his ways. A colourful cast of ‘bad husbands’ reform, repent, recant, or ‘turn thrifty’ in these ballads...


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