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Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants (from M MacArthur) DigiTrad: MARLBORO MERCHANTS |
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Subject: Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants^^^ From: GUEST,Paul Stamler Date: 30 May 06 - 04:44 PM 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.
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." |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants From: KathWestra Date: 30 May 06 - 11:29 PM Thanks for the smile and the remembrance, Paul. I can close my eyes and see and hear Margaret singing this (with wonderment that anyone could ever remember such a long and incredibly tongue-twistingly complicated song full of quaint words--as Margaret invariably did. It was a show-stopper, in Margaret's quiet way). Kathy |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants From: Joe Offer Date: 31 May 06 - 02:30 PM Is this song available on a CD, other than the Folkways custom CD of "Folk Songs of Vermont"? I can't find any mention of this song in the usual indexes. It's not in Roud, and it's not in the Traditional Ballad Index. The only print source I can find, is the liner notes from the record album, https://folkways-media.si.edu/liner_notes/folkways/FW05314.pdf. Anybody have more background information? -Joe Offer- |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants From: karen k Date: 31 May 06 - 05:14 PM Kathy, I second that. Each time I heard Margaret sing this song I was amazed at how she could remember all those words! I'm still reeling from her loss. I will miss her. karen |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants From: Desert Dancer Date: 31 May 06 - 10:09 PM The Marlboro Medley is the first track on Margaret's cd "Vermont Ballads & Broadsides" (Whetstone Records 01 -- her home label), which comes as a set with a (non-cd-sized) booklet of the full texts and notes. It was originally a cassette produced in 1989, in association with the 1991 Vermont bicentennial. The whole cd is made of historic Vermont texts, some unaltered, some adapted, some with their original tunes, and some with new ones. The notes for The Marlboro Medley are as follows: The Marlboro Medley tells us of the many items brought into the colonial village of Marlboro, Vermont, by a peddler, and of the multitudinous products made by the settlers to be offered in trade. The 1787 handwritten manuscript of this song (printed here exactly as written) was given to me in the mid-1950s by Elsie Newton Howe of Newfane, Vermont. She had inherited it along with other papers of Ephraim Holland Newton, the minister in Marlboro in 1828. At that time, he was collecting notes for a history of the town. Although he did not include the early medley in the history, he preserved it along with the following letter: Rev. E. H. Newton. Sr. Enclosed, is the productino of my Brother, when a Youth, which after much solicitation, he with reluctance, submitted to critical flagelation -- please to make due allowances, spare him as much as you can & oblige your friend Stephen Greenleaf Brattleboro' June 2d 1828 In the 1787 manuscript, the tune is given as "Black Joke." In 1962, Rae Korson of the Library of Congress Archive of Folk SOng found the tune for me in Moore's Irish Melodies (1879), printed as the air for Moore's song, "Sublime was the Warning that Liberty Spoke." Nowadays the tune is quite common in New England, used for a contra dance and for an English Morris dance. ---- ~ Becky in Tucson very glad to have seen Margaret in March when she was here. |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants From: Desert Dancer Date: 31 May 06 - 10:39 PM While I'm looking at it, here's the track list from Margaret MacArthur's Vermont Ballads & Broadsides: The Marlboro Medley (tune Black Joke was specified in the MS) The Ballad of Runaway Pond (re-write of a section of a poem by Harry A. Phillips; written with students during a school residency; tune by Margaret MacArthur) Ballad of Pudding Hill (tune by Margaret) The Ballad of Devil's Hill (poem based on a letter, written by Margaret & students, tune by Margaret) Incidents in the History of Vermont (from a broadside, to tune specified, We'll Settle on the Banks of the Ohio) Margery Grey (originally a poem, passed into singing tradition, collected by Helen Hartness Flanders) The Legend of Duncan Campbell (words and music by Margaret based on a tale from the Revolution) The Song of the Vermonters 1777 (text by John Greenleaf Whittier, collected as a song by Helen Hartness Flanders) (DD/BinT note: I learned this to a different tune from a Vermont Girl Scout camp counselor-apprentice in 1978) The Banks of Champlain (song collected by Margorie Porter) Lines Composed for Hugh J. Williams (translation of a poem in Welsh, tune by Megan MacArthur (Margaret's daughter)) The Pucker Street Song (composite text and traditional tune) The West Rutland Marble Bawn (text from a songster, set to The Rocks of Bawn, the likely intended tune) In Sugarin' Time (a poem, tune by Margaret) |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants From: Desert Dancer Date: 01 Jun 06 - 10:04 PM refresh for Joe on Pacific time.
-Joe- |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Marlboro Merchants (from M MacArthur) From: Joe Offer Date: 07 Mar 19 - 05:44 PM The song is now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvvgLOvLk-Y. I still haven't found this song in print, other than in the Folkways liner notes. It's not in Roud or in the Traditional Ballad Index, or in songbooks indexed here at Mudcat. Anybody know of other versions or sources for this song? -Joe- |
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