SWINTON MAY-SONGS

A correspondent sends us the following account of a custom in South Lancashire, which, he says, is new to him, and of which he can find no notice in either Brand, or Strutt, or Hone, or in Notes and Queries, and which has therefore the recommendation of novelty, though old:

While reading one evening towards the close of April 1861, I was on a sudden aware of a party of waits or carollers who had taken their stand on the lawn in my garden,* and were serenading the family with a song. There were four singers, accompanied by a flute and a clarinet; and together they discoursed most simple and rustic music. I was at a loss to divine the occasion of this local custom, seeing as the time not within any of our great festivals - Easter, May-day, or Whitsuntide. Inquiry resulted in my obtaining from and old 'Mayer' the words of two songs called by the singers themselves 'May Songs,' though the rule and custom are that the must be sung before the first day of May. My chief informant, an elderly man named Job Knight, tells me that he went out 'a May singing' for about fourteen years, but has now left it off. He says the Mayers usually commence their singing rounds about the middle of April, though some parties start as early as the beginning of that month. The singing invariably ceases on the evening of the 30th April. Job says he can remember the custom for about thirty years and he never heard any other than the two songs which follow. These are usually sung, he says, by five or six men, with a fiddle or a flute and clarinet accompaniment. The songs are verbally as recited by Job Knight, and when I ventured to hint that one line (the third in the third verse of the New May Song), was too long, he sang the verse, to show that all the words were deftly brought into the strain. The first song bears the mark of some antiquity both in construction and phraseology. There is its double refrain - the second and fourth line is every stanza - which both musically and poetically, are far superior to the others. Its quaint picture of manners, the worshipful master of the house in his chain of gold, the mistress with gold along her breast &c; the phrases 'house and harbour,' 'riches and store,' - all seem to point to earlier times. The last line of this song appears to convey its object and to indicate a simple superstition, that these songs were charms to draw or drive 'these cold winters away.' There are several lines in both songs, in which the sense, no less the rhythm, seems to have been marred, from these songs having been handed down by oral tradition alone; but I have not ventured on any alteration. In the second, and more modern song, the refrain in the fourth line of each stanza is again the most poetical and musical of the whole. But I detain your readers too long from the ballads themselves.

* In the hamlet of Swinton, township of Worsley, parish of Eccles.