Note—As we
close in on the end of our Winter Holidays Music Festival we will spend two
days on the close of the Twelve Days of Christmas as observed in British
tradition and the Anglican liturgic calendar on January 5. The next day, the Feast of the Epiphany or
Day of the Three Kings will wrap things up.
Twelfth Night is the eve
of the Feast of the Epiphany and the
end of the Christmas Season. In England
especially it was one last eruption of gaiety
and mirth before the more somber and sacred reflection of the Epiphany—somewhat analogous to Mardis Gras or Carnival before Lent.
A ragged caroler offers a steaming wassail bowl at a gentleman's table and is rewarded with fine libations.
In
the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was the climax of the caroling and street revelry that
followed Christmas Day and was marked with dancing,
a sexual cavorting—the subject of William
Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night—
and costumed revelry often evoking
the Holy King and semi-pagan masquerades. Mostly it was
celebrated by caroling with wassail,
a hot mulled wine or cider prepared and served in bowls. Often a landlord’s peasants and tenants came bearing large wassail bowls for the lord of the manor in
exchange for lavish gifts of food and
other beverages.
So popular was the beverage and
custom that there were a number of
songs about it that asked—or demanded—the
hospitality of the landlord at whose door the carolers appeared. The
most familiar is the gay Here We Come A-Wassailing, But there were several
others from different regions of the
Realm, each of which might variant local lyrics set to any number
of folk tunes.
Here
We Come A-Wassailing is
a traditional English Christmas carol and New Year song, sung
while wassailing—singing carols, wishes of good health and offering homemade
bowls of wassail exchange for an invitation to share drinks and food with the master
of the house. It is listed in the
Roud Folk Song Index. Gower Wassail and Gloucestershire
Wassail are similar carols.
The
song was collected and printed in the mid-19th Century but is much
older. The a in “a-wassailing” is an archaic
intensifying prefix found in A-Hunting We Will Go and lyrics
to The Twelve Days of Christmas—“Six geese a-laying.”
Hundreds
of versions of wassailing songs have been collected, including dozens of
variants collected by Cecil Sharp from the 1900s to the 1920s, mostly in
the south of England. It appears
to have travelled to the United States with English settlers,
where it was found several times in the Appalachian region. Early American recordings included Edith
Fitzpatrick James of Ashland, Kentucky in 1934 folk legend
Jean Ritchie in 1949. Americans
often sing a variant, Here We Come A-Caroling probably
because publishers and record producers didn’t thank the Yanks
would know what the hell wassailing was.
Jean
Ritchie came from an old family of Scottish and English settlers in Virginia
and Kentucky stretching back to pre-Revolutionary times. The extended family brought many traditional
songs including those that would be identified as Childe Ballads and
passed them on from generation to generation and collected many more
over time from neighbors and relatives. They played instruments and became
well known as local singers in Kentucky.
She was born the youngest of 14 children in Viper in
1922. Her family encouraged the children
to get educations and 11 of them graduated from college.
Jean
enrolled in Cumberland Junior College—now the four-year
University of the Cumberlands—in Williamsburg and from there graduated
Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in social work from the University
of Kentucky in Lexington in 1946.
She moved to New York City as a social worker at a settlement
house where she taught her traditional ballads. She fell in with the post-World War II folk
music scene and befriended Woody Guthrie, Oscar Brand, Pete
Seeger, and Alan Lomax. She
appeared with The Weavers, Guthrie and Betty Sanders at the
annual Spring Fever Hootenanny in 1947 and soon became a regular
on Brand’s pioneering folk music radio program.
In
1949 Alan Lomax recorded hours of her songs, storytelling, and family
recollections in 1949 which ended up in the Library of Congress collection. The red-haired singer played
primarily a simple mountain dulcimer but could also play banjo, guitar,
and autoharp. In 1953 she became
a full-time musician and signed a contract with Electra
Records. She has subsequently
recorded dozens of albums, written and published family memoirs and song
collections, helped found the Newport Folk Festival, and mentored generations
of singers. A much beloved mother of
American folk music she continued to sing and perform almost up to her death in
2015 at age 92.
Her
version of Here We Come A-Wassailing was recorded by Lomax in the 1949
New York sessions.
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