Origins: Regiment - Orange and Blue

Subject: Origins: Regiment - Orange and Blue
From: Fi
Date: 19 Oct 03 - 07:50 PM

Hi there - Looking for the origins of the song The Blue Cockade. The song also appears as the White Cockade, but in the blue cockade the reference is "now I'm forced to go and join the orange and the blue". Various suggestions have been made that this might have something to do with William of Orange or the lowlands in general. The only regiment I can find on the web with Orange and blue mentioned is a Prussian one, however the song also refers to five guineas and a crown suggesting some UK element - but is this just an angilicisation of the lyrics???? anyone found an answer for this?
Thanks
Fi

Subject: RE: Origins: Regiment - Orange and Blue
From: Leadfingers
Date: 19 Oct 03 - 08:09 PM

There's an East Coast version referring to The Scarlet and the Blue,Not met Orange and Blue myself.

Subject: RE: Origins: Regiment - Orange and Blue
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 19 Oct 03 - 10:08 PM

Beside white and blue, versions are also known with green cockades (there are probably others). White as a cockade-colour associated with Jacobite affiliation seems to have been a relatively late development; Frank Purslow (The Wanton Seed, 1965, notes, 122) comments, in respect of a Blue Cockade variant noted in Dorset, 1906:

" 'The Orange and Blue' (which also appears in the song Green Grows the Laurel) may refer to the army of William III, in which case the 'blue' version of the song must be the earlier."

The reference may very well not be to official regimental colours at all. At all events, you will have to look at other possibilities. The best-known White Cockade tune, of course, is older than the song that gave it its name. Whether or not the cockade in the putative "original" song was white, we don't, I think, know; though it is the most widespread form. Anne Gilchrist wondered whether "orange and blue" (in the different context of Green Grow the Laurels) might refer to an alignment of British and Irish protestant forces -this in relation to the Jacobite associations of the white-, but I've also seen it glossed (again in the context of that song) as the colours of a wedding dress. So far as cockades go, orange seems to have been the colour of Nassau, and black that of Hanover. I don't know who blue, or green, belonged to.

Subject: RE: Origins: Regiment - Orange and Blue
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 19 Oct 03 - 11:48 PM

"The Blue Cockade," as a political campaign song (c. 1830) supporting a fellow named Burton, sung to the "White Cockade," is one of several cockade songs in the Bodleian Collection.
I wonder if he won. Would he have been what is called a Tory? (Sorry, don't know much about English political history).

The Blue Cockade is cited as an alternate title for "The Inconstant Lover," but I haven't seen that version yet. More than one inconstant lover?
In the green laurel song, green joins violet or other colors and there doesn't seem to be any consistent pairing. Impossible to tell what the significance of orange and blue is. Perhaps, as Malcolm suggests, bad taste in clothing.