> Folk Music > Songs > The Dandy Man
The Dandy Man
[
Roud 15129
; Ballad Index ReSh025
; trad.]
Frank Purslow: The Wanton Seed James Reeves: The Idiom of the People
Walter Pardon sang The Dandy Man in a recording made by Mike Yates at home in Knapton, Norfolk on 24 June 1978. It was published in 1982 on his Topic album A Country Life and on 2000 on his Musical Traditions anthology Put a Bit of Powder on It, Father. Mike Yates noted on the first album:
In John Camden Hotten’s Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words (London, 1859) we find that the word ‘dandy’ was first used c. 1816-20 to denote “a fop, or fashionable nondescript” and that “Dandies wore stays, studied femininity, and tried to undo their manhood. Lord Petersham headed them.” Both Cecil Sharp and George Gardiner noted the song, in Devon and Hampshire respectively, and Walter’s text, partially remembered from the singing of his Uncle Tom Gee, has been completed from the Gardiner version printed in Frank Purslow’s book The Wanton Seed (London, 1968). At least one broadside printer, William Fordyce of Newcastle, printed a parody entitled The Dandy Wife with the chorus
So pray young men, take my advice, and mark it as a rule, That if you want a tidy wife, beware of a boarding school.
Walter once told me that Uncle Tom, who had a penchant for risqué songs such as Cock-a-Doodle-Do, The Bush of Australia, The Cunning Cobbler and The Dandy Man, would have got on well with Sam Larner that other Norfolk singer who delighted in such pieces.
… and Rod Stradling Yates on the second:
Although Roud has some 30 entries for this song (usually titled The Dandy Husband), 29 are broadside entries of some sort, the earliest of which was probably that printed by Pitts around 1815. The exception was Gardiner’s collection, in 1906, from George Smith of Fareham, Hampshire, who only knew two and a half verses of the song. Clearly, the word ‘dandy’ had different connotations in the 19th century from those of today.
Lyrics
Walter Pardon sings The Dandy Man
When I was twenty years of age, a-courting I did go
All with a dandy barber’s clerk, he filled my heart with woe
I never ceased to rue the day when I became his wife
He can do right by day nor night, ’tis true, upon my life.
Chorus (after each verse):
Young women all, take my advice and mark what I do say
If ever you wed with a dandy man, you’ll ever rue the day.
And when he goes to bed at night, like an elephant he lays
He never takes his breeches off, he sleeps in women’s stays
His mouth is like a turnpike gate, his nose a yard ’n’ a half
And if you saw his dandy legs, I’m sure they’d make you laugh.
It was upon last Christmas Day, as true as I’m a sinner
And as he stayed at home that day, he swore he’d cook the dinner
He took out all the plums and flour and mixed them in his hat
And in the pot upon the lot, the rogue he boiled some fat.
It was last Sunday morning, all by his own desire
My Leghorn bonnet and my cap, he took to light the fire
He took the tea things off the shelf, to clean off all the dirt
He washed them in the chamber pot and wiped them on his shirt.
One day, when I was very ill, he went to buy a fowl
He bought a pair, I don’t know where - a magpie and an owl
He put them in the pot to boil, tied in a dirty cloth
He boiled the lot, all feathers and guts, and called it famous broth.
As we were walking up the street, ’twas arm in arm together
It very fast began to snow, he said, “What rainy weather!”
And if he saw a hackney coach, he’d swear it was a gig
He cannot tell, I do declare, a donkey from a pig.
Now you may talk of dandy wives, but tell me if you can
Where there’s a dandy woman who can match a dandy man?
He’s a dirty, roving, lazy fool and how I’d bless the day
That they would send my dandy man straight off to Botany Bay.