Tune Req: Codlings

Subject: Tune Req: Codlings
From: Stower
Date: 27 Mar 10 - 08:45 AM

I have found a broadside of 1629 that I'd like to sing, which names the tune as Codlings. My web search has failed to reveal anything about this tune, or what the tune sounds like.

Any clues, anyone?

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Codlings
From: Mick Pearce (MCP)
Date: 27 Mar 10 - 09:34 AM

Not much help, but Simpson in The British Broadside Ballad and its Music refers to it in a footnote for the tune I Would If I Were in My Own Country. Of this tune he says: "This tune appears as "Goddesses" in all editions of The Dancing Master... An earlier keyboard setting by Giles Farnaby in The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is entitled "Quodling's Delight"[1]".

The footnote [1] (referring to Quodling's Delight) says: "The tune does not fit the broadside "Loues up to the elbowes", which is directed to be sung to "Codlings" (PB II, 125 (Pepys - MCP))...".

This seems to hypothetically equate Codlings with Quodling's and then dismiss it!

The tune isn't in JCs tunefinder and apart from the refs as the tune for the ballad cited earlier I can't find any mention of the tune either.

Mick

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Codlings
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 27 Mar 10 - 04:08 PM

Stower,
What's the ballad title? It's likely in Roxburghe and Ebsworth and Chappell were as hot as anybody on the tunes.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Codlings
From: Stower
Date: 27 Mar 10 - 08:39 PM

Amazingly, Steve, the ballad is just the one Mick names, "Loues up to the elbowes", which I have never heard sung, but I happened across it and it has a lovely set of words, I think.

I kept thinking vaguely that there was something like Codlings in Playford, but couldn't think what. It was Quodling I was thinking of, which isn't in Playford under that title (I think, but I'm happy to be corrected).

Goddesses is, though. There seem to be two basic versions of it in editions of EDM - one more simple and one more complex (it's the first tune with divisions). I've just gone back to the words of "Loues up to the elbowes" and, despite Simpson's view that the words don't fit Codlings / Quodlings / Goddesses, I can sing those words easily to that tune. Was Simpson trying to use all the notes in the more complex version of the tune, I wonder?

Anyway, tune found, question answered. Thanks, Mick and Steve.

Stower