Topic: growing folk songs

[Unwashed]

Hello All.  Overdue really, but I'm pleased to get to know you all, you're certainly a very supportive bunch.

Anywho, I'm organising an allotment party in July as part of the Big Lunch, and I want to find some growing-related folk songs that we could sing.  Any suggestions?

[Eristic]

I hoe, I hoe,
It helps my veg to grow.
A shuffle here, a scuffle there,
I hoe, I hoe, I hoe I hoe.

[chriscross1966]

I've never seen folk song seeds, do you take roots cuttings?

chrisc

[hellohelenhere]

Funny how few folk songs there are about agricultural activities, at least in the Irish tradition, that I'm most familiar with. I suppose the last thing people wanted to sing about, was work! :D

[betula]

Well I have a thread that fits the bill called the garden song in the shed.

Nobody has made a reply yet ::) ;D

[Unwashed]

Funny how few folk songs there are about agricultural activities, at least in the Irish tradition, that I'm most familiar with. I suppose the last thing people wanted to sing about, was work! :D

Hello Helen

My guess is that in England the puritans suppressed a lot of traditional agricultural songs in the seventeenth century because agriculture was so closely assosiated with the Old Religion, like John Barleycorn.

[Eristic]

My guess is that in England the puritans suppressed a lot of traditional agricultural songs in the seventeenth century because agriculture

They may have tried but then came Jethro Tull.  8)

[hellohelenhere]

We don't have many folk songs that date back that far - most of what we call 'folk' songs aren't much over a hundred years old. I'm not sure that the puritans would have suppressed agricultural themes, since Christianity is pretty big on farming analogies - they might have just recast them in a Christian light. 'We plough the fields and scatter, the good seed on the land...'
Perhaps you'll have to sing a few hymns. :D

[terrier]

Inch by inch,row by row,
I'm gonna' make my garden grow

can't think of any more tonight.. too late

Log on to Mudcat.org and ask there, you'll probably get hundreds of suggestions :)

[greenstar]

The praties they grow small?  Not that I'm casting aspersions on your potatoes, you understand...

[ACE]

Not gardening but agricultural. The Farmers boy. (good chorus). Buttercup Joe, (humourus), if you were country dancing there are loads of tunes, Farmers jig, Strip the Willow (bean sticks),  Bean Setting you could even do morris dancing which is a fertility rite. That would get your crops growing.

By the way, John Barleycorn refers to Ale making, Anyway just put an arran jumper on stick a finger in your ear and any song you are singing will be a folk song.

Do you know ' My Wife said to me don't put beans in your ear'

Loads of songs about flowers if they count.

[Unwashed]

Thanks all for the suggestions.  Hi Ace, we're going to have a bit of morris dancing.  Flower folk songs?