Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?' Wurzels

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: GUEST
Date: 09 Jun 13 - 01:26 PM

I'm very dubious about claims that the song "is said to be .." etc. Who says and what is the evidence? I suspect that it is a relatively modern song. We can trace it back to the 50s, thanks to Bob Copper but are there any earlier versions. It's not the sort of thing that "serious" folksong collectors would have noted (but they should have done).

Tradsinger

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: GUEST,Moonraker
Date: 30 Jun 15 - 02:55 PM

It was regularly sung in a pub in Liddington on Saturday nights throughout the 1970 's. Be I Basset(Wotton Basset) be I buggery. I comes up from Wareham I got a wife with calico drawers and I knows how to tear em. The fly the fly the fly be on the turnip etc.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: GUEST,MartinU
Date: 09 Mar 16 - 10:30 AM

Some time in the early 70s I bought an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and somewhere on the tape was this song, though the lyrics were slightly different:

Where be that blackbird be?
Where be that blackbird be?
'E be up yon wurzel tree
And Oi be aafter 'e.
'E sees me, and Oi sees 'e.
Underneath yon wurzel tree
With bloody big stick Oi wallop 'e
Blackbird, I'll 'ave' e'.

Sung in an exaggerated fake-Devon "Wurzels" accent.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: GUEST,Mike Yates
Date: 09 Mar 16 - 10:59 AM

A version of this song, collected in the 1960's from the Cantwell Family of Standlake in Oxfordshire, can be heard on the Musical Traditions CD "I Wish There Was No Prisons" (MTCD372).

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: GUEST
Date: 24 Sep 16 - 04:03 AM

I heard a version from a bloke from Lowerstoft.

I see the blackbird fly
I know where he be
He be up yon olly tree

He see I and
I see he
He know I be after E

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: GUEST,Paul Carling
Date: 02 Jun 18 - 05:55 PM

As a boy in Somerset in the 1950s I learnt the following.

Whur be thik blackbird be? I know whur e be. E be up thik Wurzel tree and I be ar'er e. E sees I and I sees e, and he knows I be ar'er e. Wi' a bloody girt stick I'll knock e down, blackbird I hav e.

'Thik' is pronounced with a short 'th'

As country folk often netted blackbirds and thrushes for food up to the 1st war (and sometime afterwards I guess), it is possible they were also knocked down. Rook breast meat was also used in pies - I came across somebody cooking rook pie in the English Lake District in the 1970s. Hence the reference to blackbird pie in some versions.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: GUEST,Paddy, in Coningsby.
Date: 05 Oct 18 - 03:53 PM

I was brought up near Stroud, Gloucestershire. In the 60's and early 70's, I remember this song being sung in many of the local pubs. During the annual pub outing (usually to the South Coast), it was customary to stop at two or three pubs on the way home (as well as drinking on the bus). It seemed that each village had a version of the song, with verses unfamiliar to us. The chorus was invariably something like:

'I spied 'e, 'e spied I, called I a bugger and a liar. When I find yon Blackbird's nest, I'll set the bugger on fire'.
I've always thought that the many variations of the song would merit a book.

The 'Where....to?' versions would surely have their origins in Devon, where 'where....to?' Is a common usage. We didn't use it in Gloucestershire.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: GUEST,Jim Crutchfield
Date: 16 Feb 22 - 07:52 PM

In a recording of the "Goon Show" from the late 1950s, Bernard Miles sings,

Wur be yon blackbird to?
I know wur 'e be.
'E sees I and I sees 'e,
And 'e knows I be a'er 'e.
Wur be yon blackbird to?
Up yon wurzel tree!

The tune is very close to that of "Where Did You Get That Hat", a Vaudeville song from 1888.

As somebody has mentioned, "wurzel" usually refers to the mangel-wurzel, which is a large root vegetable, not a tree (or bush). A blackbird, however, is sometimes called an ousel (pronounced "oozel"), and in some dialects, I think, a wousel (or, if you prefer, woozle, pronounced the same way). "Wousel" could easily have become "wurzel". It seems slightly less improbable that a tree with an ousel in it might be called a "wousel tree" than that a mangel-wurzel might be mistaken for a tree.

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: 'Whur be yon blackbird too?'
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 17 Feb 22 - 02:24 PM

https://youtu.be/enUvO0SdLfw