Penny Merriments: Street Songs of 17th Century England

"These songs are great fun, and all the performers seem to thoroughly enjoy themselves, with energetic and vivacious renditions. Interesting and informative notes from Lucy Skeaping about the history, use, popularity and performance (and so on) of these songs add to the pleasure of listening to the disc. I did, however, find towards the end of the disc that it was getting a bit too much… these songs are better in smaller bites than in over an hour's worth's concentrated listening. And a final warning - the words could cause offence!"
(MusicWeb Sept 2005)

The songs on this recording were the pop music of their day. Churned out by anonymous hacks, often working from dingy rooms at the back of London's print shops, they were printed in their thousands on crude penny broadsheets and known as Broadside Ballads. Sung, whistled and hummed in all walks of life they were as likely to be bought for domestic entertainment or heard on the London stage as pasted up on the wall of a country tavern.

Broadside ballads were very much an urban means of expression, a mass form of communication before the days of newspapers and magazines that reported on just about every aspect of life. Here we read of historical events like the Great Fire of London, the Spanish Armada and the longed-for return of Charles II; of bygone heroes, tradesmen, notorious criminals, the passing of the seasons and the fear of death. Like today's tabloid press, ballads also offered sensationalism - lively, lusty tales of sexual exploits, jilted suitors, shrewish wives and fumbling husbands. There is comedy too, with stories of Peeping Toms, not-so-innocent maids and country bumpkins (a popular butt of jokes throughout the century), and a plethora of pastoral characters whose amorous adventures no doubt satisfied the new city-dwellers' nostalgia for their own rural heritage.

Broadside ballads were the direct descendants of the long folk ballads of the Middle Ages. Their heyday was the seventeenth century, between the reigns of Elizabeth I and William and Mary, and although those recorded here are taken from broadsheets dating from the Restoration period, many were already widely known through oral tradition, finding their way onto the printed page as publishing became cheaper and literacy more widespread. Interestingly some were to drift back into the oral tradition again, only to be 'rediscovered', albeit often in altered form, by the great song-collectors of the early twentieth century such as Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams.

The musical arrangements here reflect a variety of settings where ballads were performed. A theatre might employ a small mixed band to play between the acts, often accompanying a singer or two in a comic interlude complete with 'scurrilous songs and obscene gestures'; a ballad singer with, perhaps, a fiddle or cittern might find an appreciative audience in a crowded street or the dark corner of a local tavern; the newly fashionable Coffee Houses were notorious for providing lusty male part-singing; while across the river in Southwark, London's infamous red-light district, the doxies would entice customers with 'a ripe selection of filthy songs'.