Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk

Subject: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: GUEST,Dave of Mawkin
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 06:28 AM

Hi All,

I'm doing some research into some possible songs I'd like to sing, I've been looking at Jolly Well Drunk- I really like the lyrics (thanks DT) but I have been unsucessful in finding the melody.. I'm aware that Harry Boardman recorded it on an album called Golden Stream... Could anyone point me in the right direction of some sheet music/score/tab/tabedit/whatever that I can learn the melody from before I give up hope and write my own melody..

cheers!

Dave

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 07:14 AM

The tune was published in a book called The English Folksinger edited by Sam Richards and Tish Stubbs. Collins 1979. I'd say the book would be hard to come by nowadays. However, the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House is likely to have a copy.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Barb'ry
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 07:48 AM

It's also in the 'Taste of Ale' book by Roy Palmer and includes the dots.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Barb'ry
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 07:49 AM

Sorry, posted too soon! If you send me your email address, I think I can send them to you (computer skills being up to the job...)

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Brian Peters
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 08:18 AM

Sometimes known simply as 'Drinking', this was apparently collected by Ewan MacColl from Beckett Whitehead of Delph, near Oldham, in 1947. However, this was the same occasion on which MacColl claimed to have collected 'The Four Loom Weaver' from Mr. Whitehead, about which certain doubts have been raised (see previous threads here and Roy Palmer's 'Working Songs') and which - like 'Drinking' - was not amongst the songs recorded from Mr. Whitehead by Seamus Ennis. I believe there was a broadside version with an attributed author, but where did the tune come from? Did MacColl make it up, as he seems to have done with 'Four Loom Weaver'? It doesn't sound nearly so much like a MacColl tune as that, though.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 08:47 AM

"certain doubts have been raised"
Think you'll find the 'certain doubts' are a bit more of the old usual Brian.
The songs were collected on a field trip by MacColl and Littlewood some time in the 50s (I think) for a programme entitled 'The Ballad Hunter' produced by BBc's Olive Shapley. The title was borrowed from an American series of the same name by John Lomax - details in the Essential Ewan Maccoll Songbook. As far as I know, no record of the programme remains as it was not the practice of the Beeb at the time to keep one.
I do wish people would remember how long MacColl has been dead and leave him in peace - unless they have verifyable information to offer.
I've got a recording of it somewhere I think, if someone wants to contact me - next week - I'm away till Monday (slumming in England!!)
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Brian Peters
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 10:02 AM

Do let me know if you find that recording, Jim, I would very much like to hear it.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: GUEST,Dave of Mawkin
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 10:36 AM

Hey guys,

Thanks for your help, much appreciated.. Barb'ry if you'd care to email me you can find my email address on this page...
http://mawkin.co.uk/ thanks!

Dave

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please
From: GUEST,Charles Biada
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 11:30 AM

I believe MacColl recorded the song on No Tyme Like The Present, but a copy of that album might be more than a bit difficult to find.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Brian Peters
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 12:39 PM

"Think you'll find the 'certain doubts' are a bit more of the old usual Brian."

Well, those doubts have been raised here before by me, amongst others, and I'm not part of the 'Bash MacColl' brigade. Nothing in the recordings of Beckett Whitehead that I've heard, nor his allusions to some of the songs he knew in his unpublished memoirs (held at Saddleworth Museum), suggests that 'Four Loom Weaver' with its grand melody would fit easily in his repertoire. More likely that Whitehead - who was not the unlettered weaver of popular myth, but a self-taught scholar in several disciplines, including dialect poetry - had in his possession a copy of the 19th century 'Jone O' Grinfilt' broadside, and that MacColl set it to the tune he went on to make famous. We already know that MacColl rewrote BW's tune for 'To the Beggin' I will Go'.

No one would be more delighted than me if the BBC radio programme you refer to were to include a recording of BW singing either 'Four Loom Weaver' or 'Drinking'.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Fred McCormick
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 01:07 PM

"Cetain doubts". I'm not going to be dragged into this one, except to point out that the Richardson/Stubbs book I mentioned has a note to say there's a broadside version of it in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Jolly Well Drunk-needs melody please!
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 26 Apr 11 - 01:45 PM

Sorry Brian - didn't mean to suggest that I had a copy of the programme - just one of the song at a club performance - which anybody is welcome to.
I have no doubt that Ewan, Bert et-al took liberties with the tunes, and doctored the words, but I also have no doubt as to his claims of collecting the songs he said he and Joan once did.
Joan once confirmed that the trip took place on the one brief time I met her; it's a programme that fascinated me.
Other songs collected on the same trip were 'T Owd Chap Cam' O'er t' Bank (7 nights Drunk) and Fourpence a Day (from lead miner Mark Anderson, I seem to remember) - not sure that Scarborough Fair didn't come from the same trip. Ewan never made any attempt to hide the fact that he re-wrote songs - he considered himself a singer rather than an academic, and unlike Bert, never made any claims on the genuinness of the ones he remade.
Ewan ad Peggy used to keep a file draw full of song texts which they put at the disposal of anybody interested and some of the songs were included designated to the singers they were taken from - this would be in the late sixties, a good number of years before he was singing either 'Drinking' or 'T Owd Chap', so it's never really made sense that he faked them so early if it wasn't to put them in his repertoire.
Didn't intend to put you in the anti-MacColl camp - sorry if I gave that impression
Jim Carroll