I've been a-courting Mary-Jane

[venta]

So, an important point, I'm sure you'll agree.

Please fill in what, if anything, you would sing/shout between verse and chorus:

(Edit: sorry, polls play merry hell with formatting and can't be edited after the fact.)

[Poll #1304903]

I think I learned this song from my parents. They sang an extra line in between the verse and chorus, but not one between the chorus and the verse.

Years later, singing this round a campfire with the Scouts, I learned a new set of fill-in lines. These are now the ones I'd sing without thinking (and the ones I filled in on the poll[*]). I thought no more about it, and decided it was another strange thing my parents had made up to fool me.

Recently (at oxfordgirl and mejoff's wedding, no less) someone started singing On Ilkley Moor and I was quite astonised to hear libellum yelling[**] something quite different in between the verse and the chorus.

I was talking to someone else recently, who came up with a third set[***] (which I have annoyingly now forgotten) and it got me wondering. How many variants are there ? Are they geographically distributed ? If you have friends who like a bit of a sing and might know On Ilkley Moor, send 'em along here to fill this poll in and I'll be most grateful.

I'm sure that there will be a moral to this tale.

[*] By which, of course, I mean will have filled in, since at the time of writing the poll doesn't yet exist.
[**] That's a bit unkind. It was quite a melodious noise. Not quite singing, though, so let's go with yelling.
[***] Though, interestingly, despite knowing the song she didn't know that the words to While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks fit really well to the tune. If you didn't know this either, give it a try. While glory shone around, while glory shone around, while glo-ry shone a-round.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

OK, motodraconis, you got your own back... your words just made me giggle out loud :) Did you learn your version from George Melly !?

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

I just made them up. It seemed the sort of thing one sings in folk songs.

I happen to like folk songs, but I've never heard that 'un.

[mrph.livejournal.com]

It turned up in a Warren Ellis comic (Gravel) a couple of months back, although without having it to hand I couldn't say quite which lyrics were used...

I may have to check. (Trying to point warren_ellis himself at the poll seems a bit cheeky :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

If you do happen across and could check that'd be great, but no worries if not. I don't expect the great man himself to come and answer ;)

(Y'know, for any well-known comic-book author I always try and shoe-horn them into a rhyming couplet. Warren Ellis, likes his trellis. I blame PWEI.)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

As a second generation Yorkshire emigrant, I only know of this song because of my mother telling me to wear my woolly hat in winter so I didn't "get stuck out on Ilkley Moor baht'at", seemingly assuming that I had absorbed its cultural context during gestation. I therefore have this feeling like I ought to know what you're talking about and am a bit rubbish for not doing.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Also, she used to sing "While shepherds washed their socks by night all seated on the ground, the angel of the lord came down and threw them all around" while we were hanging up washing. I later found this to be the incorrect lyrics during school carol singing. See also "We three kings of orient are, one in a taxi one in a car".

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh no, are you a whole 3rd person who doesn't know it ? This calls for serious cultural re-alignment on my part. I assume everyone not only knows it but is bored to death with hearing it.

I'm too scared to google for something that would reveal the tune, but an executive summary would be that someone goes on a cold moor without a hat, bad shit ensues. If you do not wish bad shit to ensue, wear a hat.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

Worth mentioning that oxfordgirl blames you for the 'right up saint cyril' insert she is now incapable of completing the Wild Rover without.

[venta.livejournal.com]

!?

Rather unfair of her, since I've never heard that in my life!

Apart from a tendency to wander off into singing The Wild Pervert instead, I sing nothing in that song that isn't strictly cannon. I might start now, though.

I do occasionally sing The Wild Rover in an odd manner, but it's a manner I don't think I can convey if I'm not in the same room.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Also, your icon is great.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Though, interestingly, despite knowing the song she didn't know that the words to While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks fit really well to the tune. If you didn't know this either, give it a try. While glory shone around, while glory shone around, while glo-ry shone a-round.

I did know this, and have been known to demonstrate. Also, you can sing Pinball Wizard to the tune of The White Cockade (the one that starts 'Oh yes me love is listed' and not the other song called The White Cockade).

Other shouting-outs - various ones for The Wild Rover - including 'balls to the Pope' and 'right up yer arse'.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I don't think I know that version of The White Cockade. Will quiz the mother when she arrives tomorrow.

She has a habit of singing Blue Suede Shoes to the tune of what she tells me is Sportsmen Arise. Sadly, the only context in which I know that tune is that it's the one my mum sings Blue Suede Shoes too.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I was disappointingly old, and ITV was disappointingly close to getting rid of the charming little presentation graphics, when I learnt that you can sing "(On) Ilkley Moor 'Baht Hat" to the Yorkshire Television tune.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. valkyriekaren's answer reminds me. I expect the chorus, when properly performed, to go:

On Ilkley Moor Baht 'at
[Where's that?]
On Ilkley Moor Baht 'at
[On a map!]
On Ilkley Moor Baht 'at
[Where the ostriches play football]

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'd forgotten about the last bit - though we sang "where the pigs fly backwards"

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Not only did I know that "While Shepherd's watched" fits to that tune, I even have a hard copy of sheet music containing the words for While Shepherds and the music for Ilkley Moor as one piece.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I do regard that as a perfectly legitimate tune/words pairing. Originating, I believe, from Sheffield where they take their carols the way they should be taken (ie in a pub, with much alcohol).

West and South Yorkshire seem to have some fantastic carols all of their own - and a selection of cracking alternative tunes for the mainstream ones.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

It may seem like I've been typing random punctuation into your poll and failing to tick the tickybox, so let me explain...

* I do know the song, so can't tick the box.
* I wouldn't expect anything between the first and second sections.
* I've never noticed an "Eh?" in the song, so can't place the second blank in order to fill it in.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I will ditto all of this, rather than add my own curious hieroglyphics to the poll.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

I'm very sad, because this is a subject I'm fond of too, and *I can't remember*. I think there was something about trousers.

OK, looking at the results so far, 'without tha trousers' sounds pretty close to what my head wants. And I remember 'where the ducks play football', but think I must have heard it *from* elethiomel, back in the day.

The ECWS was always good for this kind of thing - endless variations on popular songs. I particularly loved all the versions of Green Grow the Rushes-O. There was a communist version that I loved (and which would scandalise the Americans, I must wheel it out - they're entirely convinced that communism is inherently, unconscionably evil, and that anarchism involves blowing them up. Silly sods. And there was a gibberish version involving codwangles and bogling forks. One is the grunge upon my splod, masking my codwangle.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

OK, hang on, my brain is throwing stuff at me again. Something like 'up the dustman's trousers', or 'up the milkman's trousers', or something. And that comes with a feeling that I got it from Lincoln College rugby team. And I'm not sure they were singing about Ilkley Moor.

There's a Wikipedia article on the subject, but it's not very helpful.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

I may have got cows and ducks a bit mixed up :)

I especially like when the worms come and eat you up (without their trousers on)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Most poems [of conventional arrangement/metre etc] in the world fit to the tune of Yellow Rose of Texas or Hernando's Hideaway, while we're at it.

I amused my A level English teacher by singing Hardy's The Darkling Thrush to the (usual) tune of In The Bleak Midwinter.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

words to While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks fit really well to the tune.

This also works with "Amazing Grace" and "House of the Rising Sun". Of course, it works the other possible ways, too. The looks you get singing Rising Sun to the tune of Grace (or Shepherds) in public are well worth the effort entailed in not laughing while doing so.

Of course, having spent lots of time in various Tolkien societies, my instinct is to sing "wi' rings o' power on" and "where the Orcs play football", in addition to replacing the names.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. There does seem to be a very trouser-less consensus emerging.

I seem to be the only one who wants, when the verse ends, to talk about bikes. The line I originally heard the parents singing was "On a bike with clogs on", so it wasn't just an isolated case in the Scout troop. Will no one else speak up for the biciycles ?

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

Being an ignoramus of the utterly uncultured kind when it comes to all things folk song...

1. I do not know even the non-disputed lyrics of Ilkley Moor.
2. The closest I have come to exposure to Ilkley Moor was 'One song to the Tune of another' on ISIHAC with Graham Gardner singing something I vaguely recollect as something that might have been 'Mares eat Oats' ("Maresy D'oates and Dosie D'oates and little Lambsy Something") to what was announced as the tune of Ilkley Moor.
3. Recommendations as to how I remedy the above hideous cultural lack?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

While glory shone around, while glory shone around, while glo-ry shone a-round.

Where the ducks play football. My grandparents' priest banned them from having it to this tune at the mass celebrating one of their wedding anniversaries (40th I think). Which was on Boxing Day, lest they seem completely daft.