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Origins: By Chance It Was
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Subject: LYR ADD: By chance it was From: Ezio Date: 07 Feb 98 - 02:55 AM BY CHANCE IT WAS
By chance it was I met my love
(Recorded by Clannad) |
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Subject: RE: LYR ADD: By chance it was From: RunrigFan Date: 25 May 17 - 12:41 AM more info here http://www.joe-offer.com/folkinfo/songs/56.html |
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Subject: RE: LYR ADD: By chance it was From: Joe Offer Date: 25 May 17 - 03:22 AM This song is Roud Number 6901. Sabine Baring-Gould is the only collector listed by Roud as having come across this song, but Baring-Gould got it from more than one source. There's nothing on this song in the Traditional Ballad Index, and I couldn't find a recording on YouTube (RunridFan did later, so I pasted it above). You'll find information about Sabine Baring-Gould at http://www.sbgsongs.org You can download Baring-Gould's Songs of the West at archive.org. -Joe- Here are the lyrics that appear in Baring-Gould's Songs of the West, page 1. BY CHANCE IT WAS By chance it was I met my love, It did me much surprise, Down by a shady myrtle grove, Just as the sun did rise. The birds they sang right gloriously, And pleasant was the air; And there was none, save she and I, Among the flowers fair. In dewy grass and green we walk'd, She was timid and was coy; "How can'st thou choose but pity me, My pretty pearl, my joy? How comes it that thou stroll'st this way? Sweet Maiden, tell me true, Before bright Pheobus' glittering ray Has supped the morning dew?" "I go to tend the flocks I love The ewes and tender lambs, That pasture by the myrtle grove, That gambol by their dams; There I enjoy a pure content At dawning of the day," Then, hand in hand, we lovers went To see the flock at play. And as whe wended down the road. I said to her, "Sweet maid, Three years I in my place abode And three more must be stayed. The three that I am bound so fast, O fairest wait for me. And when these weary years are past Then married we will be" Three years are long, three times too long, Too lengthy the delay". O then I answered in my song, "Hope wastes them quick away. Where love is fervent, fain and fast, And knoweth not decay. There nimbly fleet the seasons past Accounted as one day." |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 25 May 17 - 11:29 AM Joe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j9HkMBde1o |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Steve Gardham Date: 25 May 17 - 02:43 PM And in the notes BG states 'The words of the song are to be found in a collection of early ballad books in the BL 'The Court of Apollo'. There it has 6 vs the first 3 of which are almost verbatim ours here. It also occurs in alter collection 'The Songster's Favourite Companion' with 3 vs.' He is inclined to date it from the time of James I or Charles I. I would disagree, it's typical of the stuff coming out of Vauxhall c1750. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Joe Offer Date: 25 May 17 - 02:45 PM I wonder how Clannad came across a song like this. It seems very obscure. I'll betcha there's a good story behind their discovery of this song. -Joe- |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Reinhard Date: 25 May 17 - 03:20 PM Mike Bosworth, accompanied by John Kirkpatrick on concertina, sang this song as the title track of his 1994 CD of songs from the Sabine Baring-Gould Collection, By Chance It Was. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 25 May 17 - 05:31 PM From a reissue cassette A 16th century melody is the setting for this love song which the group learned from a book of old songs of the West Of England by two fine gents glorying in the names of S. Baring-Gould and the Rev. H, Fleetwood-Shepherd. Jolly Good! https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/bychanceitwas.html |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: leeneia Date: 25 May 17 - 05:55 PM I listened to Claddad's recording on YouTube. It's a good tune, and it can be found at abcnotation.com Thanks. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Joe_F Date: 25 May 17 - 05:56 PM "Save she and I"? Forsooth! |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: leeneia Date: 25 May 17 - 11:21 PM Sure. That way 'I' rhymes with the birds that were singing 'glorious-lye.' Steve, I looked up Vauxhall. Are you referring to Vauxhall the auto maker, Vauxhall the district in SW London, or Vauxhall the transport station? |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Reinhard Date: 26 May 17 - 12:23 AM Vauxhall the auto maker, leeneia, in 1750? Try Vauxhall Gardens. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: leeneia Date: 26 May 17 - 10:14 AM Why not? Some auto makers were originally carriage-makers. I'd like to hear some tunes from Vauxhall. Anybody know of any? |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Reinhard Date: 26 May 17 - 10:40 AM No tunes yet but you can find a list of singers and musicians performing at Vauxhall Gardens on a website dedicated to them. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Steve Gardham Date: 26 May 17 - 04:07 PM Vauxhall and Ranelagh and a few others were pleasure gardens of the 18th century in London. They were frequented largely by the well-off and the songs they produced were very distinctive having been published in numerous upmarket songsters of the period. Most of them are easily spotted by the flowery language with classical allusions and the idealistic situations they describe. Nymphs and shepherds, milkmaids and ploughboys abound. A large number of the flowery type hunting songs come from this source. Some of us have found it necessary to plough through this dross (IMHO)in order to find the origins of some of the things we nowadays call folk songs. Some of the later songsters c1800 were published with tunes heavily laced with the output of the Dibdins, Dr Arne, Shield and the like. The Yorkshire Musical Miscellany, the Edinburgh Musical Miscellany. Thankfully those tunes that found their way into the folk canon were much simplified. However I've known at least 2 traditional singers who could sing 'Tom Bowling' with most of the original notation, not my cup of tea though. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 26 May 17 - 04:32 PM Who care of the source? |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Steve Gardham Date: 26 May 17 - 04:56 PM As the drug addict said just before he died of taking some bad shit. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 26 May 17 - 06:00 PM OK, but that has no bearing on the thread. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: leeneia Date: 27 May 17 - 12:44 PM I found piano music for 'Tom Bowling' on YouTube and had a listen. Thanks, Steve. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Steve Gardham Date: 27 May 17 - 05:12 PM Who care of the source? Okay, lots of people on Mudcat care, not all, but it takes all sorts..... Shouldn't be an issue. The fact that there is a prefix 'origins' for posters to use should answer your question. |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Joe Offer Date: 27 May 17 - 06:13 PM Hi, RunrigFan - our usual practice is to thoroughly study a song. We've been working collaboratively for over twenty years to buily a body of information on songs, so that people can find whatever they might want to know about a song. I spend a lot of time cross-indexing. I also do my best to designate one thread per song as an "origins" thread, a thead that contains the best information we can come up with on a song. Why? Because we find it interesting. This thread started out in 1998 as a "Lyrics ADD" thread. Ezio submitted the song and asked for help coming up with a good transcription. When you brought the thread up the other day, I found that it was the only thread existing on the song, so I renamed it "origins," and started adding information. I see that you posted Clannad's lyrics to the song, but you didn't say if you found those lyrics in a book or a CD booklet, or if you transcribed them yourself from a recording. Note that Ezio also posted lyrics from Clannad. Are they the same as what you posted? If there are differences, it's a good idea to point out those differences so the rest of us can take a listen and see which interpretation we agree with. We're working toward a one-thread-per-song ideal, but that's not a realistic possibility. So, we try to have one "origins" thread that gives complete information without duplication. It gets complicated when people start separate "Add/request/lyrics/chords/melody" threads, so it's better to put all the information on a song in the same place. -Joe- |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 27 May 17 - 06:22 PM Joe From a reissue cassette A 16th century melody is the setting for this love song which the group learned from a book of old songs of the West Of England by two fine gents glorying in the names of S. Baring-Gould and the Rev. H, Fleetwood-Shepherd. Jolly Good! This is from a Clannd 2 cassette released late 80s/early 90s |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: GUEST Date: 27 May 17 - 06:26 PM "I found piano music for 'Tom Bowling' on YouTube and had a listen." Leenia, It used to crop up every year on the Last Night Of The Proms together with the The Saucy Arethusa (melody is a Princess Royal variant). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasia_on_British_Sea_Songs |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 27 May 17 - 06:28 PM Compare the lyrics here https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/bychanceitwas.html Some differences Married in Wedded for example And as we wended down the road. and And when the weary years are past Then wedded we would be" |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: Joe Offer Date: 27 May 17 - 06:42 PM RunrigFan, you posted the Baring-Gould lyrics that I had already posted. Those lyrics were obviously the source for the lyrics of the Clannad rendition that Ezio posted - yet you posted two more instances of the Clannad lyrics. That's not the idea - we want complete, accurate information without a lot of duplication to wade through. We prefer printed early sources over recent transcriptions of popular recordings. But please don't duplicate lyrics that have already been posted. I deleted your duplications. -Joe- |
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Subject: RE: ADD: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 27 May 17 - 06:46 PM What do you want? Isn't the idea to credit the lyrics as it's written? Clannad sing different lyrics, obviously same source, but some lyrics changed) I'm done! |
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Subject: RE: Origins: By Chance It Was From: Joe Offer Date: 27 May 17 - 06:52 PM RunrigFan, I took the time to compare versions side-by-side. The various Clannad versions had negligible differences, and there were no differences between the lyrics in the two messages with the Baring-Gould version. We're building a reference work, not a garbage can. It you think the transcription posted is inadequate, post your transcription and take the time to point out the differences. But once we had found what was clearly Clannad's source (Baring-Gould), it was clear there was no need to spend any more time on the Clannad lyrics. There aren't any significant differences - all versions know to us so far stem from Baring-Gould. Baring-Gould got the song from two different singers, so it's possible that there are significant differences between the two - but so far, we've found only one of the two. -Joe- |
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Subject: RE: Origins: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 27 May 17 - 06:56 PM Sorry, but in a traditional song, different singers will have different lyrics unless you assume every version of say Loch Lomond will have the same lyrics. Paul Mounsey said it best. Folk Music doesn't belong in a museum. So you saying different lyric ie wedded, and past (not passed) as I highlighted in bold is not different, OK. |
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Subject: RE: Origins: By Chance It Was From: Joe Offer Date: 27 May 17 - 07:28 PM I couldn't agree more, RunrigFan. But when the differences are minor, it's better to just point out the differences that appear. "Passed" was a mistake - I had copy-pasted the Baring-Gould lyrics from the folkinfo site at joe-offer.com. I corrected that error above, once I checked the original Baring-Gould text. Thanks for pointing that out. "Wedded" appears in all three Clannad transcriptions, but it's "married" in Baring-Gould. I prefer "wedded,' myself. So, it's a good thing to point that out. But once lyrics from a particular source have been posted, then it's better to post a message that simply points out errors or differences in understanding in the earlier post. If we have three posts and they're all from the same source, it gets mind-boggling. If it's a significant difference, I will make corrections in the earliest post, as I did just now. Ezio, from Italy, posted a lot of lyrics in the early years of Mudcat, usually asking for help understanding what he was hearing since he was not a native English-speaker. So yes, there are some mistakes in his transcription, but most of his misunderstandings were corrected in the post of the Baring-Gould lyrics. There are times when an earlier post (or the Digital Tradition) is too full of errors to make it worthwhile to give directions to every error. In that case, post a message with full, corrected lyrics, but mark the differences in <b>bold</b> type like I've done here. But with your three lyrics posts, that made five posts of more-or-less the same version of the song. -Joe- |
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Subject: RE: Origins: By Chance It Was From: GUEST,Jon Date: 28 May 17 - 08:11 AM Past/Passed seems to be one of my transcription errors. Joe's site is an archive but when folkinfo was live, some errors got spotted and others didn't... There can be discrepancies between the first post in the "discussion thread" and the "song display" there as the attempted policy was to leave that post as originally entered. I don't think I included this in the archive but be we logged the date/time of last change together with a reason (past/passed, if corrected, would have gone down as a minor change/correction). I guess that could be a bit confusing but if a difference was spotted, the song display at least ought to be the one that reflected our latest understanding. |
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Subject: RE: Origins: By Chance It Was From: Steve Gardham Date: 28 May 17 - 10:17 AM >>>Paul Mounsey said it best. Folk Music doesn't belong in a museum.<<<. Whilst this can be interpreted in different ways, as it stands this statement is just plain wrong and needs rewording. If folk music hadn't been deposited in museums over the last few centuries we would have precious little of it left to make use of and enjoy. The very example being discussed in this thread makes the point nicely. If you interpret Paul's point as meaning the best place for Folk Music is out there being played and listened to, then I could agree whole-heartedly, but some of us enjoy studying the music as well as listening to it. Don't be so dismissive! |
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Subject: RE: Origins: By Chance It Was From: leeneia Date: 28 May 17 - 10:36 AM Guest, thanks for the info and the link regarding the Last Night of the Proms. Who'da thunk it? |
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Subject: RE: Origins: By Chance It Was From: RunrigFan Date: 28 May 17 - 09:44 PM I'm not being dismissive at all. |
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