Cunning peasants and Mudcat search

Subject: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Thompson
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 04:47 AM

I'm desultorily wondering what songs there are about cunning peasants. The Rustical Farmer comes to mind, as does Arthur McBride, with its mockery of the recruiters' offers.

Tried searching Mudcat, but the search seems to have completely given up the ghost. Is the database now just too huge to search?

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 05:13 AM

well, using my favourite search method, a Google site search - "cunning peasants" site:mudcat.org - the only reference was to this thread!

As Mudcat search is playing up & has been periodically for a long time - (ps. Max is working on fixing it) - I always use Google site search

try other phrases or titles that come to mind & good luck!

sandra

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Jack Campin
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 05:35 AM

Lovely Joan.

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: ClaireBear
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 05:41 AM

While Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping.

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Paul Burke
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 05:49 AM

Box on her Head
Basket of Eggs

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Mr Happy
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 06:00 AM

Eynsham Poaching Song

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Artful Codger
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 06:21 AM

"The Land"--words by Rudyard Kipling, setting by Peter Bellamy. Generations of cunning peasants.

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 06:38 AM

The Husbandman & the Serving Man

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Thompson
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 11:36 AM

By the way, the Arthur McBride I'm talking about isn't the Great War one, but "I have a young cousin called Arthur McBride, he and I took a stroll down by the seaside".

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Paul Burke
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 06:38 PM

Don't mix up Arthur with Willie.

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Joe_F
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 08:37 PM

We don't properly have peasants in the U.S., but there is that conversation between the farmer and the traveler that ends

"You don't know much, do you?"
"Maybe not, but I ain't lost."

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Artful Codger
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 09:13 PM

That's from "The Arkansas Traveler". (Gid Tanner's version?)

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: The Doctor
Date: 01 Feb 10 - 04:53 AM

You could also look at these ones:
Blow away the morning dew (original version)
The maid on the shore
The highwayman outwitted
Sweet Joan (as opposed to Lovely Joan)
The Crockery Ware
Young Maidenhead
The Christmas Goose
The Oyster Girl (song, not tune)
Peggy and the Squire

These are all songs in which a clever girl outwits a presumtuous man. Whether all the girls are peasants depends on your definition.

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: peregrina
Date: 01 Feb 10 - 05:12 AM

Hamish Henderson's Ballad of the Men of Knoydart

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: PoppaGator
Date: 01 Feb 10 - 01:14 PM

Computers, even at Mudcat, cannot search for a general idea or overall quality ("cunning") ~ only for specific combinations of characters (in other words, words).

If there were indeed a lyric that contained the phrase "cunning peasants," verbatim, it would have come up. That the search function was unable to translate your articulation of an overall concept into identifible snippets of text is not its fault. It's your job to figure out what "keywords" might appear in a song lyric that meets your criteria.

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Thompson
Date: 02 Feb 10 - 07:46 AM

Joe F, why do you think you don't have peasants in America?

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Feb 10 - 08:04 AM

Futuresaurus is confused. What they are describing is the proletariat, not the peasantry. Peasants are tied to a patch of land, somebody in an urban McJob isn't.

The process Futuresaurus describes is the same one that Marx saw happening 150 years ago - as capitalism comes apart, the lower bourgeoisie become proletarianized and the proletarians get poorer.

As is common in American political discourse, Futuresaurus is borrowing from Marx but doesn't have the guts to say where their ideas come from.

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Joe_F
Date: 02 Feb 10 - 06:29 PM

Thompson: The link you give uses the word "peasant" in a way that is unfamiliar to me & that is not defined. For me (see the OED) it means "one who lives in the country and works on the land, either as a small farmer or as a labourer". The word originally (and for me still) connotes foreignness, with respect to Britain and (by extension) with respect to English-speaking countries; the corresponding native is a *yeoman* and (according to my prejudices) quite a different (& superior) fellow. "Peasant" comes from France, and you can get a good idea of why, for me & probably a lot of others, it is a dysphemic word by reading Kipling's "Norman and Saxon". (Unfortunately, if I go away to dig up a link, I will lose what I have written here, so you'll have to do your own Googling.)

Subject: RE: Cunning peasants and Mudcat search
From: Amos
Date: 02 Feb 10 - 06:47 PM

The one that comes to mind is the one of the Irishman in jail who wrote his aged father telling him not to dig up the garden because that's where the guns were buried.

Needless to say he got his potato bed turned for him, by burly redcoats.


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