Lyr Add: Colly My Cow (traditional set)

Subject: ADD: Colly My Cow (traditional set)
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 04 Oct 01 - 05:22 PM

As part of the continuing search for tunes to match songs in the DT that were submitted without, I have been looking at the three Colly My Cow files.  These were taken from postings by Bruce Olson, but have been harvested in a rather odd fashion; a transcription of a single broadside has unaccountably been split into separate files.  They should be read in the following order:

COLLYCW  Verse preamble.
COLLY MY COW 2  Verses 1 to 3.
COLLY MY COW 3  Verses 4 to 13.

Bruce also referred to a traditional set in Baring Gould's Songs of the West, which I add below, together with his notes:

COLLY, MY COW

(Traditional; from Baring Gould's Songs of the West, revised edition of 1905)

A story, a story, I'll tell you just now,
It's all about killing of Colly, my cow.
Ah! my pretty Colly, poor Colly, my cow!
Poor Colly will give no more milk to me now.
And that is the way my fortune doth go!

Says little Tom Dicker, Pray what do you mean,
By killing your Colly when she was so lean?
Ah! my pretty Colly, &c.

Then cometh the Tripeman so trim and so neat,
He bids me three ha'pence for belly and feet;
Ah! my pretty Colly, &c.

Then cometh the Tanner with sword at his side,
He bids me three shillings for Colly, her hide;
Ah! my pretty Colly, &c.

Then cometh the Horner who roguery scorns,
He bids me three ha'pence for Colly, her horns;
Ah! my pretty Colly, &c.

The skin of my Colly was softer than silk,
And three times a day did my Colly give milk;
Ah! my pretty CoIly, &c.

Here's an end to my Colly, she's gone past recall,
I have sold my poor Colly, hide, horns, feet and all.
Ah! my pretty Colly, &c.

Three shillings and three pence are all for my pains,
I've lost my poor Colly, my milk and my gains.
Ah! my pretty Colly, &c.

---

Baring Gould commented:

"This is a portion of an old ballad in the Roxburgh Collection, ed. Chappell, iii. p. 601-

Little Tom Dogget, what doest thou mean,
To kill thy poor Colly now she's so lean ?
Sing oh ! poor Colly; Colly my cow ;
For Colly will give me no more milk now.
Pruh high, pruh hoe, pruh high, pruh hoe,
Pruh, pruh, pruh, pruh, pruh, pruh, pruh, tal-dal daw.

Printed by T. Passinger (1670-86) at the Seven Stars on London Bridge.   The ballad is also found in the Rawlinson Collection and elsewhere.  It was afterwards sung in a shortened form at the concerts in Marylebone Gardens, and is printed in The Marylebone Concert, N.D.

In the heading to the old ballad we have

A country swain of little wit, one day
Did kill his cow, because she went astray.

But it is probable that the song originally turned on a different theme.  On the 9th September 1605, a man was killed by a Protestant in the Rue de la Harpe, at Paris, for singing the song De Colas.  This song was composed by a seditious faction, with the intent of provoking the Huguenots, upon the subject of a cow which had walked into one of their conventicles during the performance of divine service.  The cow, which belonged to a poor peasant named Colas, was killed by the Huguenots for her sacrilegious act.  Thereupon the Catholics made a collection in every town and village in France to raise a sum for the indemnification of Colas.  The day after the murder the singing of the song of Colas his Cow, was forbidden under the penalty of the gallows, and it was even dangerous for anyone to hum the tune in the street (Concert Room Anecdotes, 1825, ii. p. 230).  The song must have been brought to England and adapted to English words after the Restoration, and as the story of the occasion of the killing of the cow was forgotten, it was altered.  The tune is very old, and we had it from an aged woman at Kingsweare, who sang  The Abbot of Canterbury  to it.  But this has its own tune, given by Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time, 1859, i. p. 348.  I have added the final verse."

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898) has the following entry for Colly My Cow, which I quote for its oddity, not because I believe it to be in the slightest way relevant:

"A corruption of Calainos, the most ancient of Spanish ballads.  Calainos the Moor asked a damsel to wife, who said the price of winning her should be the heads of the three paladins of Charlemagne, named Rinaldo, Roland, and Olivier.  Calainos went to Paris and challenged the paladins.  First Sir Baldwin, the youngest knight, accepted the challenge and was overthrown; then his uncle Roland went against the Moor and smote him."

There is maybe another point which might be worth raising.  There is a certain similarity in the narrative here to other songs in which an animal is killed and the body disposed of, sometimes piecemeal, such as The Red Herring, The Derby Ram and the Poor Old Horse.  The two latter, in their more traditional forms, belonged to midwinter luck-visiting customs in which the Owd Tup or the Old Horse was slaughtered and subsequently brought back to life.  Both of these were spread in broadside form to areas where the custom was unknown, and have frequently been found in tradition outside the luck-visiting context (and without the resurrection), which now persists mainly in Cheshire, Derbyshire and North Wales. Whether this song, in its traditional or broadside form, was in any way influenced by such things is unlikely to be established.  (The Poor Old Horse in the DT, incidentally, is a quite different song.)

As to the tune, Baring Gould is unclear in his notes as to whether he had any particular reason for attaching it to Colly My Cow.  He states, after all, that he noted it from a singer who was using it for a completely different song.  Perhaps he knew things that he did not mention (such as where the text came from!); with luck, Martin Graebe may have something to add.  A midi of the rather fine tune, made from the notation in Songs of the West, goes to  Mudcat Midis;  until it appears there, it can be heard via the  South Riding Folk Network  site:

Colly My Cow.  It does not fit the broadside version terribly well, but is capable of being modified to that end.