The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #19412   Message #652361
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
17-Feb-02 - 07:59 PM
Thread Name: Penguin: John Barleycorn
Subject: RE: Penguin: John Barleycorn
The recent revival of another John Barleycorn thread reminds me that I didn't list Forum entries here.  These are the ones that contain substantive information:

Barleycorn/Songwainers
Text(s) as recorded by the Songwainers, who set a traditional text from Fred Jordan to the tune of We Plough the Fields and Scatter.

Lyr/Chords Req: barleycorn

Non-Barleycorn  Modern parody.

John Barleycorn
Tune in abc format, with one verse, as printed in Sharp & Marson, Folk Songs From Somerset, 3rd Series. (1906). So far as I can tell, this was noted by Sharp from Robert Pope of Alcombe in Sussex.  The rest of the thread deals with unrelated subjects.

There are rather a lot of copies at  Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads  of a broadside edition, by Brereton of Dublin, of the song in pretty much the form printed in O Lochlainn's book, though the final couple reads

The drunkard is a durty man he used me worse than all
He drank me up in his durty gut & spewed me against the wall

Somehow I neglected to mention this in my earlier list.  As is usual with Brereton, the sheets are plentiful but badly printed; this is one of the more legible copies:

Lines written on the barley corn   Printed c.1867 by P. Brereton, 1, Lr. Exchange St., Dublin.

A completely unrelated song using the familiar metaphor can be seen at the  Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection:

John Barleycorn Good-Bye  A comic song on Prohibition. Words and Music by John Stark. St. Louis, MO: Stark Music Co., 1919.

The Roud Folksong Index assigns the following reference numbers:

(Sir) John Barleycorn: Roud 164
John Barleycorn is a Hero Bold: Roud 2141
John Barleycorn My Jo: Roud 6050

There is some overlap in classification at the moment between the first two; the third appears to be known in one example only (see my first post in this thread).