The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #66904 Message #4177804
Posted By: Lighter
27-Jul-23 - 10:02 PM
Thread Name: Origins: Come Landlord Fill the Flowing Bowl
Subject: RE: Origins: Come Landlord Fill the Flowing Bowl
Thanks, Steve.
However, I have little confidence that "Come Jolly Bacchus" is related except in the topic and scansion.
It's surprising that the several collected "Landlord" tunes available through the Roud Index closely resemble or are identical with the familiar one, and none seem to be like those of Chappell and Stanley Harris.
Nor does the index turn up anything about "Three Jolly Post-Boys" (much less "Coachmen")!
Oscar Brand in 1949 seems to have introduced the two stanzas about the girl who "lingers for another": "She'll be a jolly mother."
The American collegiate "New Song Fest" (1954), ed. by Dick and Beth Best, marks the first appearance of "and brother gets another."
The Kingston Trio (1958) pronounced "merry" as "merr-eye," uniquely in the history of English.
When Sussex singer George Spicer sang the song for Mervyn Plunkett in 1959, with an unusual pattern of repeats, he sang that the girl who kisses and tells "ought to have her lips cut off."
He added:
"But the girl who washes her face With the tail of her shirt and water: She's the kind of gal for me, She's the kind of gal for me, She's the kind of gal for me, She is a gentleman's daughter! Daughter! Daughter! She's the kind of gal for me, She is a gentleman's daughter!"
(Audible at the Roud Index, No. 1234.)
Among the various current online versions, one (almost predictably) replaces "coachmen" with "sailors."
Commercial recordings of "Landlord" often present the song as a "Christmas carol." (But apparently not those with the chimney and perpendicular additions.)