Hi folks:

In doing a tribute show for Margaret MacArthur, who passed last Tuesday, May 23, 2006, I played a song she recorded at least twice and clearly cherished. It's called "Marlboro Merchants" or "Marlboro Medley", and the lyrics come from a 1787 manuscript in her possession. As my own tribute to the memory of this lovely and delightful woman, I post the lyrics here. They're copied from the booklet of her Folkways LP, "Folk Songs of Vermont", with some transcription errors corrected by listening to the recording. There may still be some errors, or extinct spellings.

Peace,
Paul

Marlboro Merchants
^^ by a Mr. Greenleal (typo for Greenleaf?), Brattleboro, VT, 1787
Sung to the tune of "The Black Joak"

When Marlboro merchants set out for peddling
Made lawful by custom let none be meddling
Barter is legal when trading for grain.
With wherry and horses see how they turn out
Each peddler taking his different route
With notions and things both curious and common
To please men and children and gratify women
Which I shall here attempt to name.

Their budgets consist of variety
There's no two pungs whose loads agree
Each peddler hath his different ware
Whirls and spindles, and jews harps and thimbles
Shoemaker's lasts and peg awls and wimbles
Dippers and noggins and cans to make grog in.
To barter for corn, have you any to spare?

Here comes the bowls and wooden dishes
And sleek looking trouts, most excellent fishes
From Marlboro's ponds and holes in the brook.
Where in winter a fishing they go
Up to their waist bands through the snow
There through the ice they cut a hole
Then they fish without a pole
Dextrous anglers with a hook.

Low hog yokes and goose yokes and taps and fassets
And tools to make them jack knives and hatchets
To hamper your pigs, your geese and draw beer.
Parchment screens to clean flax seed
Cheese tongs and wooden fans and weaver's read
Great spinning wheels and swifts and reels
And snow shoes strung from toe to heel
To run on the crust and catch the deer.

Come buy our bread troughs, buy our sieves
To sift your meal from bran and sheives
Different sorts, both hide and hair.
Half bushels and pecks all made by guess
Two quart dippers a thousand or less
Pokes, ox yokes, and hopples for horses
Straw hats and bonnets for lads and for lasses
As good as the best the gentry wear.

Now comes the baskets and the rakes
Enough to supply the thirteen states
Besides a large pile of new-made chairs.
Pails, pipkins, and tubs for washing and brewing
Great wooden platters to take up your stew in
Brooms, dyepots and keelers, salt mortars, and pestles
Pudding sticks, ladles and whipstocks and whistles
Besides wooden spoons as plenty as hairs.

Here comes the turnips and fine bobbin laces
Braided bark mittens your hands to case
(A rare invention everyone says.)
Saddle tree wood and birch barrel bottles
Shoemaker's spools and ironwood shuttles
Besoms and oven lids, handy when baking
Boxes for flour and trays to make cake in
And Wickopy stay tape to lace up the stays.

But now we must leave the ingenious mechanic
Sing how the root doctors pursue their botanical
Rambles through forests o'er hills and the plain,
To dig blue cohosh and sarsaparilla
Green petty morel and purple anjelica
And snake root and gensing and modest wood peony
The root for consumption and mending old china
And poke root and blood root and ella campane.

In early settling the town one year
They'd no luck in hunting the bear or the deer
No bread to be had, potatoes were scarce.
Then had the smallpox with all its infection
Have passed through the town in every direction
It could not have touched such dioted men
Where dozens could breakfast on robin or wren
Disease disappointed, must sneak from the place.

But now they fare better there's something to eat
Various fowls and four-footed meat
Partridge and woodcock and wild turkey hen.
Geese, pidgeons, and ducks, skunks and woodchucks
Lusty raccoons well fatted with nuts
Porcupines, squirrels, rabbits and hares
For beef they have moose and for pork they have bears
And saddles of venison now and then.

A pung or two more brings up in the rear
With green spruce boughs for brewing beer
Rosin of hemlock and hack metack gum
Balsam of fir and sugar of maple,
Lime shingles and salts the Marlboro staples
Red ochre, saltpeter, butternut physic
And assmart pills a cure for the pthysic
And candy, black strap, too stubborn to run.

And now my medley draws nigh a close
A rap on my knuckles, a wring of my nose
Shant hinder my toast, I'll out with it here.
May manufacturers long abound
In this mechanical peddling town
And may those sons whose sires are dead
Has (Have??) as good means to get their bread
As their fathers have had this many a year.

---

Note from Joe Offer: These lyrics were added to the Digital Tradition in February, 2007.

Notes from the lyrics from Smithsonian Folkways (https://folkways-media.si.edu/liner_notes/folkways/FW05314.pdf):

A pung is a sleigh.
Black strap, commonly called Wax, is made by pouring hot molasses on the snow, which prevents granulation.
(this term was so starred on the original manuscript), which was written by a Mr. Greenleal of Brattleboro in 1787 about Marlboro, the town in which we live.

The Folkways notes and the MacArthur recording have the first word of the second-last line as "have."