HUM 223: Madrigals ...

Harry Belafonte says without the influence of African American musicians, "When the Saints Go Marching In" would have sounded like an old English madrigal. Maybe, maybe not. But the popular music that Englishmen brought to America didn't sound anything like today's. Let's get a taste of what they sounded like ...

We'll listen to two madrigals from a 1984 television series by the British Broadcasting Corp. (apparently from a rerun with Italian subtitles) called the "Madrigal History Tour," narrated and sung by the King's Singers, a popular group of English classical musicians. Both were written about the same time the British colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts were established. A madrigal is simply the name we give to a type of secular song that was popular in England, as well as continental Europe, during the 1500s and 1600s. While they sound very "classical" to 21st-century ears, some of them were obviously targeted to appeal to young men studying at Oxford, Cambridge or the Inns of Court (women were not allowed to attend the universities or to study law). Songs like this were the forerunners of today's popular music.

The first deals with the alleged glories of tobacco, first brought back to England from Virginia and other colonies in the early 1600s. Smoking tobacco was a huge fad, and it was controversial. The song was set to music by Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623), who was a serious composer of choral music, organist of Winchester College and Chichester Cathedral, although he was also "noted and famed for a comon drunckard and notorious swearer & blasphemer." It's called "Come, sirrah, Jack, ho ..." which means something like, "come here, servant Jack." They are singing in an old-fashioned English pub, like those of the 1600s.

The words are:

Come sirrah Jack ho,
Fill some tobacco,
Bring a wire and some fire,
Haste haste away,
quick I say,
do not stay,
shun delay,
for I drank none good today.

I swear that this tobacco
Is perfect Trinidad-o;
By the very very Mass,
never never was
better gear
than is here,
by the rood,
for the blood,
it is very very good,
'tis very good.

"Sirrah" was a form of address used with servants, kind of like "hey waiter!" Trinidad was a type of tobacco grown in the West Indies, and the "rood" was an old English word for the cross. By the 1600s, swearing by the cross was considered a mild oath like "damn it" or "darn it."

The second song is called "Fair Phyllis," by John Farmer (1570–1605), who was Organist and Master of Children at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin and also, at the same time, organist of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. As one of the King's Singers points out in the video, it revolves around a mild "double entendre" or double meaning. (It's a French word, and he pronounces it like DOO-bluh an-TAHN-druh.) In other words, it's a dirty joke. It's worth knowing that people told dirty jokes in the time of Shakespeare, and it's also worth knowing they weren't always very funny. Some things never change; or, to use some more French, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The words are:

Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone
Feeding her flock near to the mountain side.
The shepherds knew not,
they knew not whither she was gone,
But after her lover Amyntas hied,
Up and down he wandered
whilst she was missing;
When he found her,
O then they fell a-kissing.

Keep all this background in mind later this semester, when we study how Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones and other British musicians of the 1960s and 70s came under the influence of American blues artists.