98  The Nightingales Song; Or The Souldiers rare Musick,/ and Maids Recreation [Pepys 4.41]

This song’s history, in and out of print, is a little curious. It seems to have been registered for the first time in 1639. At this date, the ballad is identified in the Stationers’ Register only as ‘The souldier and his knapsack’ but there are very good reasons for considering this a reference to The Nightingales Song. Such half-remembered titles were common in the Register, and our ballad refers to the soldier’s knapsack both in its subtitle and in one of its pivotal verses. Moreover, we have been unable to find any other seventeenth-century ballad that might conceivably have been remembered as a song about ‘The souldier and his knapsack’.

There are only three surviving editions of the ballad but it was registered again in 1675, suggesting on-going success. Surprisingly, there is no evidence of publication in the eighteenth century but the song, in a reduced version and without a designated tune, was printed again in the nineteenth century, under the title ‘Bold Grenadier’ (there are copies in Bodleian Library).

Folk-song collectors from the late-nineteenth century onwards found that the ballad was very well-established in vernacular singing traditions under numerous titles (including ‘The lady and the grenadier’, ‘The nightingale’ and ‘One morning in May’). Variant versions were found in many parts of England, America and Canada, most of them retaining only the core aspects of the original narrative (Vaughan Williams Memorial Library). The tunes that were used seem to bear no relation to the original melody, and most of the collected versions are more similar in length and content to the song printed in the nineteenth century than to the early-modern broadside.

Having said this, a minority of the folk-songs include phrases that are found in the seventeenth-century song but not in the later printed version (examples include ‘with kisses and compliments’ and ‘take warning by me’). There may have been other published versions, now lost, that included these expressions, though it also seems likely that oral transmission played its part in the song’s somewhat mysterious journey through time.

Certainly, a good case can be made for the song’s progress through the following series of stages: professional composition and publication of the original during the seventeenth century; oral transmission through the eighteenth century, reducing the song’s length by preserving only the essentials of its narrative; fresh publication of this pared-down song in the nineteenth century; further re-shaping of folk-song versions under the influence of the newly published text; and subsequent collection of the lyrics by folk-song enthusiasts in versions that reveal the variable traces of each previous phase. The folk-song has also been recorded by numerous artists, including The Coon Creek Girls (Kentucky), The Dubliners (Ireland) and IQ (England).

To seventeenth century ballad-consumers, it seems certain that this was primarily an entertaining song about sex, distinguished particularly by its amusingly musical double-euphemism: fiddle-playing stands for male sexual endeavour while the nightingale’s song signifies female orgasm (if you have already listened to the ballad without considering these possibilities, then we apologise). Both sides of the equation must have generated mirth, but the ballad-makers’ attitude to the nightingale is more sustained and somewhat more inventive than their treatment of the fiddle. Everyone knew that fiddles were often sexual but the song goes further than most in exploring the symbolic potential of the eponymous songbird.

Nightingales were already associated strongly with spring-time and courtship. People were aware that they only sang between April and June, before vanishing completely and mysteriously in the autumn (it is now established that they head for Africa but early modern writers could only speculate in relation to their winter whereabouts). The connection between nightingales and spring is expressed in many literary sources, including ballads. In a different song called The Nightingale:/ Whose curious Notes are here explain’d, we are told that ‘the little pretty dulcid dainty creature’ sings to accompany the courtship activities of apprentices in May (the tune was unusually complex and required the performer to imitate the sound of the nightingale).

Both The Nightingale and The Nightingale’s Song apparently originated in the 1630s, and it seems possible that the authors were bouncing ideas off one another, like two rival songbirds competing for territory in the woods. If so, then The Nightingale’s Song seems to have won the contest, perhaps by pushing the sexual implications of the sound more forcefully than previous authors had done. Of course, the ballad-makers were never explicit but the repetitive refrain offered listeners thirteen opportunities to penetrate the not-so-secret metaphorical mystery. Where many ballad-makers vaguely implied a link between the song of nightingales and sexual pleasure, the authors of The Nightingale’s Song all but spelled it out.

This is an excellent example of the ballad-maker’s craft: an existing convention that appealed through familiarity was given a potent boost so that it simultaneously delivered a surprise. It was a job well done, and when the song is performed live today, it retains the capacity to make listeners laugh (during the research for this project, the Carnival Band performed it at concerts in Belfast, York and London).

Most early-modern references to the singing of nightingales emphasise its sweetness and its links to happy human comings-together in the spring sunshine. The sound, however, was actually rather more complex than this might imply. With some regularity, the nightingale’s call was also considered mournful. This contrary association seems to have derived in part from the ancient Greek tale of Philomela, who was turned into a nightingale by the gods following a brutal cycle of rape, mutilation and murder. Under the influence of this legend, the singing of nightingales could be understood as hauntingly sad, and melancholic traces are frequently encountered in ballads of the seventeenth century. One lover, featured in a ballad by Richard Barnfield, heard the bird sing, and commented, ‘For her griefe so lively showne,/ makes me thinke upon my owne’.

While this aspect of the nightingale’s reputation was not articulated explicitly in our hit song, it may nevertheless have sprung to the minds of some listeners and readers. After all, the ‘fair Damosel’ of the ballad fails to secure a promise of matrimony from her seducer before agreeing to sexual intercourse, a fact that places her in a perilous position. She receives ‘a Gold Ring’ from the lustful soldier but such a token of commitment was unlikely to save her from danger if she ended up pregnant and deserted by this representative of a notoriously unreliable occupation. The risks are also articulated in the moral warning with which the song concludes and hinted at by the potentially regretful lilt of the melody (see also Featured tune history). In sum, these darker shades perhaps gave this apparently light-hearted song an emotional depth that helps to explain its early-modern appeal.

The ballad also taps into a more general early-modern fascination with the nightingale and its song. This is probably the most widely-referenced bird in English poetical culture, and when the playwright Ben Jonson sought a name for his fictional ballad-singer he opted, not surprisingly, for ‘Nightingale’. Jonson’s Nightingale was male but most poets referred to the celebrated songbird as ‘she’, even though it is only the male of the species that sings. Nightingales were also commonly kept as pets, cherished for their singing abilities, and authors offered instruction on all aspects of their capture and care (see Blagrave).

We should also note that the sound of nightingales was far more familiar in seventeenth-century England than it is today. It was also more clearly audible because levels of ambient sound were much lower than they have since become. Nightingales were widely distributed, and their song was surely well-known to all English people in the centuries before habitat destruction and other forms of environmental degradation caused their numbers to collapse. In the seventeenth century, this meant that those who knew the ballad might think of it and chuckle each time they heard their neighbourhood nightingales giving voice.

Christopher Marsh

References

Anon, The Nightingale:/ Whose curious Notes are here explain’d... To a new and much affected Court Tune (registered, 1633; edition of 1633-80).

Anon, Regular and irregular thoughts in poets and orators (1697), p. 13.

Richard Barnfield, A Lovers newest Curranto... To a pleasant new tune (c. 1625).

Joseph Blagrave, New additions to the art of husbandry (1675), pp. 53-72.

Broadside ballads from the Bodleian Library: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

Stefan Buczacki, Fauna Britannica (2002), pp. 337-38.

The Coon Creek girls, ‘The soldier and the lady’ on Early radio favourites (Old Homestead Records, 1983), track 13.

Morgan Dickson, ‘Nightingales in medieval text and sound: liminality and evasion’, Polysèmes Revue d’études intertextuelles et intermédiales 22 (2019).

The Dubliners, ‘The nightingale’ on Irish folk favourites (Hallmark, 2000), track 2.

English Broadside Ballad Archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

English Short Title Catalogue.

Vic Gammon, Desire, drink and death in English folk and vernacular song, 1600-1900 (Abingdon, 2016), pp. 52-56.

George Gascoigne, The steele glas (1576), B1r-v.

IQ, ‘The bold grenadier’ on The lost attic (GEP, 1999), track 9.

Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (first performed, 1614) in The workes of Benjamin Jonson (1641).

Hyder E. Rollins, An analytical index to the ballad-entries (1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (1924; Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1967), nos.1945 and 2468 .

Steve Roud, Folk Song in England (2017), pp. 289, 561-62 and 658.

Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, https://www.vwml.org/ [search for Roud number 140].

Yorkshire folk song: https://www.yorkshirefolksong.net/song.cfm

We have not found other seventeenth-century texts that seem closely related to The Nightingales Song at the level of precise verbal content. A later folksong was based on the ballad, however, and is discussed in the Song history. This folksong subsequently left its traces in several other songs (see Gammon and Roud).

Christopher Marsh

References

Vic Gammon, Desire, drink and death in English folk and vernacular song, 1600-1900 (Abingdon, 2016), pp. 52-56.

Steve Roud, Folk Song in England (2017), p. 289.