#AFOLKSONGAFORTNIGHT NO.3: JOHN BARLEYCORN

Following a 4-month pause (for work & family reasons), the week of the impending harvest moon feels like a good time to reboot this blog by exploring the enigmatic roots of John Barleycorn.

#AFolkSongAFortnight · #AFOLKSONGAFORTNIGHT NO.3: JOHN BARLEYCORN

John stumbles across the field, dazed and winded. Buffeted by the heavy, vengeful blows of the men now encircling him, he tries desperately to fathom the situation.

They fell upon him so quickly that even the direction of arrival seems unclear - West, North, East - Kent perhaps? - or South.

How many are there? Adrift in this sudden, remorseless blizzard of fists and feet, he can scarcely tell if there are three, or only two.

Who could they possibly be? Glimpses of their garb, and fragments of their frenzied curses, vows and exhortations are confusing and contradictory. Are they men of a rival farm? Knights? Not - Kings, even? Are they - could they be brothers?

Before more clues to his predicament can be snatched from the tumult, John's now-swollen eyes re-widen in terror at the whistle and gleam of blades unsheathed. A keen edge bites the back of his leg and he drops to his knees. Vicious metal rains on him from all directions - his neck, his golden head... John writhes and twitches in the furrow, and still the blows come.

His eyes and mouth fill with soil.

They grind him into the dirt.

They cover his remains.

This is only the beginning of the story.

GODS OF THE FIELD

John Barleycorn, 2019 - Copyright Matt Rowe, used with kind permission

Few ballads in the British folk tradition have been collected, recorded, analysed and mythologised to anything approaching the extent of John Barleycorn. The song and the character have also provided widespread inspiration for artists in other fields, including poetry, theatre, cinema and the visual arts. Perhaps the most common lyric, amongst the many variants, goes as follows:

 

There were three men come out of the West

Their fortunes for to try

And these three men made a solemn vow

John Barleycorn should die

They've ploughed, they've sown, they've harrowed him in

Throwed clods upon his head

And these three men made a solemn vow

John Barleycorn was dead

 

They've let him lie for a very long time

'Til the rain from heaven did fall

Then Little Sir John sprung up his head

And soon amazed them all

They've let him stand 'til midsummer day

'Til he looked both pale and wan

Then Little Sir John's grown a long long beard

And so, become a man

 

They've hired men with scythes so sharp

To cut him off at the knee

They rolled him and tied him by the waist,

Serving him most barbarously

They've hired men with the sharp pitchforks

Who pricked him to the heart

And the loader he served him much worse that that

For he's bound him to the cart

 

They've wheeled him round and around the field

'Til they came unto the barn

And there they've made a solemn mow

Of poor John Barleycorn

They've hired men with crab-tree sticks

To cut him skin from bone

And the miller he has served him worse than that

For he's ground him between two stones

 

Here's Little Sir John in the Nut Brown Bowl

And here's brandy in the glass

And little Sir John in the nut brown bowl

Proved the strongest man at last

For the Huntsman, he can't hunt the fox

Nor so loudly to blow his horn

And the tinker, he can't mend kettles nor pots

Without a little Barleycorn

 

For many, a great proportion of the piece's primal power lies in the hint of primordial origins - specifically, as a hymnal for a spirit of the fields which in turn represents a dying and reviving God ritually worshiped by our ancestors to encourage a prosperous harvest.

The late-Victorian cultural anthropologist Sir James George Fraser - in The Golden Bough (1890-1922), his mammoth exploration of such nature cults - painstakingly constructed a vision of an evolving-but-continuous thread of propitiatory rites across Europe and the Middle-East. Though his methods and conclusions are widely disavowed by academia today, over the past 130 years Fraser's work has exerted a powerful and persistent influence on art, the occult, psychology and popular understanding of myth and religion.

In Frazer's view, prehistoric humans - revering nature for its fundamental influence upon their survival - developed systems of 'sympathetic magic', aiming to positively manipulate key events and cycles including weather, hunt and harvest. Such practices evolved into the rituals of the earliest forms of religion. An accompanying 'animistic' sense of the raw divinity of the natural world (and of specific plants, animals, and other natural features and phenomena) unfolded into more sophisticated belief-systems featuring anthropomorphised deities embodying and personifying aspects of both nature and ancient human culture.

Within such systems, Fraser identifies a recurring character - a god, entwined with the fields, harvest or wider forms of peace and prosperity - who in myth and scripture is killed and then resurrected. Many of the names remain familiar today - Adonis, Attis and Osiris. To honour these archetypes, and to secure the plenty with which they were associated, communities or their priestly castes would anoint a sacred king or other elevated figure as the deity's living representative. Periodically - sometimes with the annual cycle of the seasons, sometimes when the strength and vitality of the incumbent began to wane - this earthly incarnation would be ritually murdered; either in combat by a challenger, or by the community as a whole. Sometimes their remains would be scattered across the fields or orchards. Both this sacrificial victim, and the very god itself, would then be reborn - through the flourishing of the crops, as well as the initiation of a successor.

With some changes of personnel and purpose, Robert Graves presents a similar thesis in The White Goddess. Later writers convey the tradition to Albion's shores; in The Lost Gods of England (1957), Brian Branston picks up Fraser's mention of the Norse deity Balder (intriguingly, Branston attributes the ultimate thwarting of Balder's resurrection in the sagas, to the Vikings' rejection of agriculture in favour of reiving and raiding; they no longer needed to venerate a replenishing god of vegetation). Fantasy novelist and Tolkien scholar Kathleen Herbert (Looking for the Lost Gods of England, 1994) identifies the Anglo-Saxon figure Beowa with the god of the fields (Beow is the Old English word for barley, and the name of Boewa's immediate ancestor Sceafa translates as 'sheaf'). Furthermore, Herbert proposes Beowa and the saga-hero Beowulf as one and the same (though many others - including Tolkien himself - dispute this); and names both as antecedents to John Barleycorn.

The mythological continuity from Tammuz and Apollo, Balder and Beowulf down to Sir John Barleycorn himself is definitely beguiling - and there are numerous fascinating outlines of this online, including in recent years by Austin Hackney and, just this month by Scarlet Ravenswood on Youtube.

However compelling this may be, deep scholarship of the song presents limited confirmatory evidence. A.L. Lloyd seems to acknowledge this, but can't bear to completely relinquish the romance of the idea. Instead he equivocates, in both The Penguin Book of English Folk Song (1959) and the sleeve notes to The Watersons' Frost and Fire LP (1965): '…it's such an unusually coherent figuration of the myth of the Corn-king cut down and rising again, that the sceptical incline to think it may be an invention… carried out by some educated antiquarian.'

 

PUT BARLEYCORN IN THE NUT-BROWN BOWL

Sir John Barleycorn, 18th Century English Woodcut 

In The New Penguin Book of English Folk Song, Steve Roud goes much further in rejecting such mythological origins. In so doing, he particularly cites Pete Wood's forensic study of the ballad's lineage in Folk Music Journal Vol. 8, No. 4 (2004). Wood further extends his research in a brilliant 'genealogy' of the song published on Mustrad in 2009.

Rather than descending from the cults of Attis and Osiris, both Wood and Roud identify an origin song, Allan-a-Maut (or 'Quhy sowld nocht Allane honorit be?'), first noted in the 16th century Scottish Bannatyne Manuscript. Allan-a-Maut personifies the barley harvest, with an ultimate focus on the production of alcohol. Others have noted a seemingly credible earlier precedent - riddle 28 of the Anglo-Saxon  'Exeter Folio', which bears many similarities to this Caledonian ballad.

Wood traces multiple progeny of Allan-a-Maut, but particularly notes a 1624 London broadside entitled 'A Pleasant new Ballad. To be sung evening and morn, of the bloody murder of Sir John Barleycorn.' 'The Pleasant Ballad' establishes many key features of the song familiar to modern ears, including three vengeful rival knights - Sir Richard Beere, Sir Thomas Good Ale, and Sir William White Wine - who are driven to murder Sir John, as he represents the raw material for the manufacture of each (assuming that we're dealing with barley wine!).

Many further versions and derivations were to follow, with a modernisation by Robert Burns also playing a prominent role. Between both manuscripts and broadsides, and the instances gathered by Victorian and Edwardian folklorists and song-collectors, Wood notes - if I read correctly - at least 116 subsequent variations of the lyric, and 46 different tunes.

The role of alcohol persists throughout, and indeed in America the name 'John Barleycorn' is perhaps primarily synonymous with drink; even giving the name to Jack London's notorious 1913 diary of dissolution. In many later versions of the ballad, however, the central emphasis shifts from bibulousness to a pronounced focus on John Barleycorn's slaying, resurrection, and the processes of the harvest.

 

CONTAGIOUS MAGIC

Crying the Neck, Cornwall, 2008. Wikimedia Creative Commons License
 

I fully subscribe to Wood and Roud's identification of the song's origins as a paean to drink; but I don't wholly share their conclusion that the enduring sense of portentous pagan drama that the lyrics carry in the popular consciousness is mere wishful thinking, or a romantic misreading.

In the same way that practical everyday objects can acquire a ritual or magical association through the shift in their use over time (for example, cups and candles in Christian liturgy; horse-shoes in folklore and superstition; and keys and hour-glasses in magical practice), it seems uncontroversial to surmise that a song or other work of art or craft might absorb new meaning and intention from its subsequent interpretation, deployment and the wider culture which surrounds it.

In Where is Saint George? Pagan Imagery in English Folksong (1977), Bob Stewart declares that 'John Barleycorn... collected in the West Country and elsewhere, is a magical song beyond doubt... and also a drinking song.'

My contention is that this drinking song gained magical qualities by absorbing resonances from three co-existing and intertwining facets of British society - the church; farming customs; and folklore.

The Golden Bough generated particular controversy in drawing Jesus into the lineage of the dying and resurrected god - likening the mocking of Christ to the ridiculing of the king in the Roman Saturnalia; and his execution, to a ritual recreation of the death of Haman in the Jewish festival of Purim.

Accepting the many caveats over Fraser's conclusions, later iterations of John Barleycorn - with their focus on the merciless savagery meted out to Sir John - clearly echo the Stations of the Cross:  sentencing, mocking, scourging, rebirth. Burt Lloyd even invokes an alternative title: 'The Passion of the Corn'. Barleycorn's three assailants, meanwhile, correspond to Christ's nativity (the three magi); crucifixion (the three soldiers who dice for his garments); and resurrection (the three Marys). John Barleycorn's descent into the earth, placement in the barn and grinding between stones can each readily be likened to Jesus's laying in the tomb (and the comparable descents of Osiris, Balder and others to the underworld). The many versions which conclude in celebrating the produce of the harvest - bread and ale - quite obviously parallel transubstantiation and the Eucharist. To round it off, the most widely collected tune which accompanies the song is a variation of  'Dives and Lazarus' - and so evokes a biblical return from the grave which foreshadows Christ's own.

Turning to customs - the first recorded transcriptions of the song fall close in time to the earliest accounts of a number of relevant seasonal traditions, which venerate the 'final cut' of the harvest season. In many accounts, this 'last sheaf' is held to contain the spirit of the wheat field itself. The following details are synthesised from multiple sources, including Margaret Baker's Folklore and Customs of Rural England (1974); Ralph Whitlock's A Calendar of Country Customs (1978); Brian Shuel's Guide to the Traditional Customs of Britain (1985); Charles Kightly's The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain (1986); Steve Roud's The English Year (2006); and Of Shadows: 100 Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (2016).

The formerly common practice of making corn-dollies, or kern-babies, saw the harvest's last bundle fashioned into usually diminutive, semi-human form, and treated as either a beloved child or esteemed guest. According to local habits the dolly might then variously be paraded through the village; sat at the high-table for the end-of-harvest feast; ceremonially burnt; or else kept, in homes or churches, either until Christmas or the following planting season. In Rites and Riots (1981), Bob Pegg shares testimony of a corn dolly-type custom in Perth, Scotland in 1797. Meanwhile, in Stations of the Sun (1996), Ronald Hutton notes descriptions of corn-dollies as effigy May queens from 1598, and possibly 1575.

A similar, and sometimes interlinked, practice is 'crying the neck' - also once widespread, but now largely confined to the far South-West of England. Through this custom, the spirit of the field is 'chased' through the reaping into the final standing bundle, and then ceremonially cut. Some accounts portray farm workers attempting to sever the stems with eyes closed, backs turned or by throwing their sickles, but observers differ on the reasons for this - on a broad continuum between fearful reverence of the corn spirit, or mirthful hi-jinks as the season tips from hard graft to well-earned celebration.

Again, the earliest dated description I can find is given by Hutton, who casts back to the 1770s for mention of the custom in Cornwall and Devon. In Maypoles, Martyrs & Mayhem (1994), Cooper and Sullivan posit earlier origins, writing: ‘...Both Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt had harvesting customs involving corn dollies and Last Sheaf rites, almost exactly the same as those being practiced before the mechanisation of the harvest in Britain early [in the 20th] century'; but no direct evidence is presented for this, and it may indeed be a claim informed by The Golden Bough.

I also propose a third, perhaps more speculative, folkloric tributary imbuing John Barleycorn with primal pagan vitality. English myth and legend features a procession of figures intertwining the characteristics of man and plant - the foliate heads carved in churches; Robin Hood; the Green Knight; Jack in the Green; the Garland King. In a 1939 edition of Folklore, the journal of the Folklore Society, Lady Raglan - inspired by Frazer - unified this hedgerow panoply as 'The Green Man'. Whatever inaccuracies of approach Raglan may also have inherited from The Golden Bough, it seems clear that these archetypes held widespread familiarity. Could it be possible that their uncanny holy/heroic/horrific residue gradually permeated our Knight of the Fields in the Stuart, Georgian and Victorian popular imagination?

 

BY THE FRUITS YOU SHALL KNOW THE ROOTS

 

John Barleycorn, Mark Wallinger, 1984. Arts Council Collection

As Bob Stewart asserts, John Barleycorn - despite his likely more prosaic, brewery-derived origins - clearly weaves uncanny atmospheres and imagery that border on the magical. This singular power has been richly channelled by artists across all disciplines, not least poetry, through the likes of George Mackay Brown's 'The Ballad of John Barleycorn' (from 1969's An Orkney Tapestry), and Ted Hughes' solemn, savage 'The Golden Boy' (a poem for children, amazingly...! From 1976's Season Songs):

 

In March he was buried

And nobody cried

Buried in the dirt

Nobody protested

Where grubs and insects

That nobody knows

With outer-space faces

That nobody loves

Can make him their feast

As if nobody cared.

 

But the Lord's mother

Full of her love

Found him underground

And wrapped him with love

As if he were her baby

Her own born love

She nursed him with miracles

And starry love

And he began to live

And to thrive on her love

 

He grew night and day

And his murderers were glad

He grew like a fire

And his murderers were happy

He grew lithe and tall

And his murderers were joyful

He toiled in the fields

And his murderers cared for him

He grew a gold beard

And his murderers laughed.

 

With terrible steel

They slew him in the furrow

With terrible steel

They beat his bones from him

With terrible steel

They ground him to powder

They baked him in ovens

They sliced him on tables

They ate him they ate him

They ate him they ate him

 

Thanking the Lord

Thanking the Wheat

Thanking the Bread

For bringing them Life

Today and Tomorrow

Out of the dirt.

Brutal rites with a clear echo of both Fraser and John Barleycorn occur in a series of scripts for stage, television and big screen in the 60s and 70s - including Afore Night Come (the 1962 debut play by Penda's Fen screenwriter David Rudkin) and Robin Redbreast (a 1970 BBC Play for Today). John Barleycorn himself makes a baked cameo in 1973's The Wicker Man.

Late 20th Century British visual artists including Richard Long and Mark Wallinger have confronted this spirit of the fields in their work; Sir John cyclically sprouts anew with the later generations of contemporary practitioners, as evinced most recently by Matt Rowe and Laura Mansfield's acclaimed 2019 exhibition John Barleycorn Must Die at New Brewery Arts, Cirencester. A startling piece from this show can be seen at the top of this blog, and you can also listen online to an illuminating podcast about the exhibition with Matt and Laura. Matt was also kind enough to share some thoughts with me about present-day, revenant interest in John Barleycorn: "It’s important for each generation to construct their own interpretation of folk identity. Reinterpreting folk narratives is an essential process that keeps vernacular traditions alive."

This re-engagement and re-interpretation is also clear in the 'Folk Horror' community's embrace of John Barleycorn. Indeed, he was the focus of a lockdown illustration challenge in the ever-excellent Folk Horror Revival group on Facebook, and New York-based illustrator Jesseca Trainham's stunning winning entry - a tarot triptych for this 'Passion of the Corn' - features at the bottom of this page.

HERE'S A HEALTH TO THE BARLEY MOW

 

The Young Tradition (source unclear - happy to remove if requested)

The principal artistic inspiration served by John Barleycorn is of course musical. Following on from the breadth of archival versions identified by Pete Wood, there are hundreds of recordings by musical artists across the British Isles and beyond - some transcendent, some dreadful. I've compiled a John Barleycorn Spotify playlist on my partner's account, which features 64 of the more engaging examples.

Specimens deserving an honourable mention include a jaunty Bedfordshire strain tackled by Steeleye Span (and a similar, if rougher, take by Suffolk singer Bob Hart); Shropshire cousins captured from both Bert Edwards and Fred Jordan (the latter also used by Vulcan's Hammer); the Lincolnshire Haxey Hood 'Two Brothers' variant captured in field recordings by both Jean Ritchie and Peter Kennedy; multiple Irish occurrences from the likes of Wolfhound and the Pikemen; and a singular rendition by the by-then long-retired Essex farm worker Ernest Jordan.

More modern (re)imaginings include those by jazz ensemble Burton Bradstock, the Imagined Village's somewhat bloated mod-dub odyssey, and a gossamer reverie from Robin James Isherwood. Cold Spring's John Barleycorn Reborn series contains some fine treatments by friends of mine, and other artists I admire, but the presence of individuals on those compilations with persistent links to neo-traditionalist circles that border the far-right makes me somewhat reluctant to make a recommendation.

The most widespread and familiar version to most is probably that recorded by Traffic in 1970, as the title-track to their fourth LP John Barleycorn Must Die.

Using a seeming variation on the aforementioned, well-known tune 'Dives and Lazarus', this version was collected by Cecil Sharp on 31 August 1909 from Shepherd Haden of Bampton, Oxfordshire. A.L Lloyd likely bears much responsibility for its popularity, including it in the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959) and recording it on 1961's English Drinking Songs.

As both producer and mentor to the group, Lloyd probably also played a key part in its inclusion on the Watersons' 1965 Topic LP Frost and Fire: a Calendar of Ceremonial Folk Songs. It's from here that newly recruited reed player Chris Wood brought it to Traffic, and their arrangement (including the distinctive guitar intro) has been the dominant version ever since, although excellent alternative renderings have also been recorded by Martin Carthy, John Renbourn Group, Barry Dransfield and others.

Next comes the version of the song that I've attempted myself, in the Soundcloud link at the top of the page; it's one of the earliest strains collected 'in the field' during the Edwardian folk revival - again noted by Sharp, this time on 27th August 1906, (probably) from John Stafford in Bishop's Sutton, Somerset.

In Folk Song Collecting (1907), Sharp comments that Stafford '…told me that he was a coal miner, that he had heard the song when he was a boy, fifty or sixty years ago; that it was sung by a tramp who was passing through his village; that it had pleased his fancy, and that he had never forgotten it.' Despite the apparent memorability of the tune, through two meetings Stafford couldn't recall more than one verse, so in English Folk Songs (1920) Sharp set this melody alongside an older text drawn from James Dixon's Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England (1846).

As Pete Wood comments, 'this tune is quite distinct from all the other tunes used for the song, and gives an impression of great antiquity.' The Young Tradition found it in Sharp's book, recording a stark three-part harmony that feels of a piece with the accompanying David Munrow-assisted early music explorations on their third and final studio album Galleries (1969). 'Fol de rol' is often (generally unfairly) used to disparage the perceived absurdity and irrelevance of English folk music, but here the repeated refrain 'Fol the dol the didi-ay /  Fol the dol the didi-a-ge-wo' has the force and mystery of a ritual incantation.

The earliest recording I've been able to find precedes The Young Tradition's by some 12 years - coming from New York concert baritone John Langstaff, on 1957's '…Sings American And English Folk Songs And Ballads'. A strange, haunting rendition, Langstaff's voice seems both stately and hysterical. The angular piano accompaniment could be a partial antecedent to the artful dissonance of Dolly Collins's arrangements for 1970's Love, Death and the Lady.

Langstaff went on to found the famous 'Christmas Revels', and much later (1991) re-recorded a fantastic, plangent, medieval rendition bearing the clear influence of Munrow and The Young Tradition. In their wake, this 'John Stafford' arrangement has settled into the repertoire at the intersection of art song and early music - with other recordings by Shura Gehrman (a pseudonym of Nimbus records founder Count Numa Labinsky) & Adrian Farmer (1987), and Opus Anglicanum (1998).

The final version I'd like to highlight is a more contemporary innovation, by Gloucester vocal trio The Songwainers. Pete Wood notes that the group's Ken Langsbury 'tells how the rhythm of the machines in his printing shop seduced him into setting the song to the tune of 'We Plough the Fields and Scatter' ', the ubiquitous Victorian anglicisation of a German harvest hymn. This version - included on the group's eponymous 1971 LP, and later also taken up by Fairport Convention - connects John Barleycorn's liturgical and libational connotations, with a familiar, uplifting verse and riotous chorus:

Come put your wine into glasses

Put your cider into old tin cans

Put Barleycorn in the nut-brown bowl

For he's proved the strongest man

...Which seems an apt, full-circle note to finish on; thanks for reading (if you got this far), and please feel free to share, or to comment below!

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This blog is dedicated to the memory of Pete Coward - a fundamental influence on my musical and counter-cultural sensibility, taken all too soon.

John Barleycorn tarot, copyright Jesseca Trainham, 2020. Used with kind permission. https://www.etsy.com/people/ladybuckthorn