Cecil Sharp's Note 95 (1916)

No. 95. The Sheep-Shearing

The tune to which this song is set is, of course, that of “The Sweet Nightingale,” a song that is known to almost every folksinger in the West Country (see Songs of the West, No. 15, 2d ed.). Bell, in his Ballads and Songs of the English Peasantry, prints the words, which he first heard from some Cornish miners at Marienberg and afterwards procured from a gentleman at Plymouth. He erroneously assigns them to the 17th century. For the Rev. S. Baring-Gould has shown that they first appeared in Bickerstaff’s “Thomas and Sally” (1760), set to music by Dr. Arne. The West Country tune, however, is quite distinct from Dr. Arne’s, and has all the qualities of the genuine folk-air. Mr. Baring-Gould suggests that Bickerstaff’s words “travelled down into Cornwall in some such collection as ‘The Syren,’ and were there set to music by some local genius.”

I have collected several variants of “The Sweet Nightingale,” and the singer of one of them casually remarked that the tune did not really belong to those words but to a sheep-shearing song. He went on to say that many years ago, when he was a boy, a very old man used to come to his cottage and sing this sheep-shearing song; and then he repeated to me the words of the first stanza, which were all that he could recall. Now the singer was a man of ninety years of age, so that the sheep-shearing song must, presumably, have been in existence before 1760. It will be noticed that in this version of the air, the fourth phrase is not lengthened as it always is when sung to the words of “The Sweet Nightingale.” How and why this variation came to be made is an interesting point (see English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, p. 110).