> A.L. Lloyd > Songs > The Soldier and the Maid
> Louis Killen > Songs > One May Morning
> Steeleye Span > Songs > Seventeen Come Sunday
> Waterson:Carthy > Songs > Seventeen Come Sunday

Seventeen Come Sunday / As I Roved Out / One May Morning /
The Soldier and the Maid

[ Roud 277 ; Laws O17 ; G/D 4:791 ; Henry H152 , H793 ; Ballad Index LO17 ; VWML PG/2/49 ; Bodleian Roud 277 ; Wiltshire 454 ; Mudcat 151629 ; trad.]

A.L. Lloyd sang The Soldier and the Maid in 1956 on his Tradition album The Foggy Dew and Other Traditional English Love Songs. He commented in the liner notes:

The encounter of the licentious soldier with the obliging young girl was an old story when Roman troops patrolled the great wall between England and Scotland. For newer versions, listen to the gossip around any army camp, any day, anywhere. Of the many ballads in the family of The Trooper and the Maid, this is perhaps the best. The song glides along the razor-edge between merriment and cruelty and maybe that has commended it to the imagination of many singers. This is another of those ballads which words are usually “cleansed” in print.

Joe Heaney sang As I Roved Out in 1964 in a recording made by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. This was included in 2000 on his Topic 2 CD anthology The Road from Connemara.

Harry Cox sang Seventeen Come Sunday in a recording made by Peter Kennedy in between 1953 and 1956 on the 1965 EFDSS album Traditional English Love Songs.

Louis Killen sang One May Morning in 1965 on his Topic album Ballads & Broadsides. Angela Carter commented in the sleeve notes:

In the eternal springtime of English love songs a girl tries to fend off the advances of an importunate young fellow man by telling him that she is too young; but he proves to her the truth of the old saying, “when they're big enough, they're old enough.” Told from the point of view of the girl who, as in one American version, later brings forth a little baby boy after the statutory nine months—“and me not fifteen years of age”, the song can be intolerably poignant; most versions, though, are emphatically masculine as this bawdy guffaw. Hammond collected this treatment of a widespread theme in Dorset in the early years of the century, but it was deemed sufficiently indelicate to bring a blush to Edwardian cheeks and was duly doctored for publication. This is how Hammond heard it first of all.

Bob Hart sang Seventeen Come Sunday to Rod and Danny Stradling at home in Snape, Suffolk in July 1969. This recording was released in 2007 on his Musical Traditions anthology A Broadside. A later recording by Tony Engle from September 1973 was released in 1974 on the Topic album Flash Company. It was also included in 1998 on the Topic anthology Who's That at My Bed Window? (The Voice of the People Volume 10).

The Broadside from Grimsby sang Seventeen Come Sunday on their 1973 Topic album of songs and ballads collected in Lincolnshire, The Moon Shone Bright. Nine of the fourteen songs on this album were collected by Percy Grainger in 1905 and 1906, amongst them this one. The Broadside commented in their liner notes:

Seventeen Come Sunday, from Fred Atkinson of Redbourne, [9 September] 1905. A fine sturdy Dorian tune to one of the most widely-known sets of words. When Grainger published this song in 1912 he had to omit the seventh stanza.

Planxty sang this song under the generic title As I Roved Out in 1973 on their LP The Well Below the Valley. Their sleeve notes commented:

Although the next song has the same title as one on the first side, the resemblance ends there—it is a completely different song. This version was learned from Andy Rynne of Prosperous, Co. Kildare.

Jumbo Brightwell sang Seventeen Come Sunday in a recording made by Keith Summers in 1971-77 on the Veteran anthology of traditional folk songs, music hall songs, and tunes from Suffolk, Good Hearted Fellows. Mike Yates commented in the liner notes:

When the poet James Reeves included a text of Seventeen Come Sunday in the book The Idiom of the People (1958) he added the note, “The original of this song, whatever it was, shocked all other editors, from the eighteenth century onwards.” Reeves' text came from Cecil Sharp's manuscript and includes a verse that Sharp omitted when he printed the song in his English Folk Songs, Selected Edition, 1921, Volume 1:

I went unto her mammy's house, When the moon was shining clearly,
She did come down and let me in, And I laid in her arms till morning.

Clearly, such goings on were not to be encouraged! As Reeves said, the song was first encountered in the eighteenth century when Robert Burns found a set being sung by a girl in Nithsdale. Burns forwarded a slightly rewritten text to James Johnson, who included it in his The Scots Musical Museum (Edinburgh, 1787, 6 volumes) under the title A Waukrife Minnie (A Lightly-sleeping Mother). Broadside texts, from the 1820's or earlier, were printed in London by Pitts and Jennings and dozens of versions of the song have been collected throughout the English-speaking world. Cecil Sharp alone collected 22 versions of the song in southern England and there are 14 Scottish versions in the Greig/Duncan collection.

Steeleye Span—then including Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick— recorded Seventeen Come Sunday in 1977 for their tenth album, Storm Force Ten. And John Kirkpatrick played it again in concerts with the John Kirkpatrick Band that were released a year later on their live album Force of Habit. He commented in the liner notes:

Based on the version sung by the traditional Suffolk singer Bob Hart on the 1974 Topic LP Flash Company. I brought this song to the table when I was in Steeleye Span, and you can hear what we made of it on their 1977 recording Storm Force Ten. I was prompted to pair it with the dance tune, I think, because a couple of notes were the same as the song in one bar. The tune is called Johnny Get Your Hair Cut, and was included in The English Folk Dance & Song Society's Community Dance Manual No 6, first published in 1964. It's not very clear where the tune comes from, but we can be pretty sure it's American. There's a third part that we don't play. The riff is Martin Carthy's, and in Steeleye's version we ended it rather moodily with a long minor chord. Here we make it much snappier.

Sheena Wellington sang A Waukrife Minnie in a concert at Nitten (Newtongrange) Folk Club, Scotland, that was published in 1995 on her Greentrax CD Strong Women. She commented in her liner notes:

Burns contributed this night-visiting to The Scots Musical Museum vol 3 with the note “I pickt up this old song and tune from a country girl in Nithsdale. I never met with it elsewhere in Scotland.” The girl, as usual, suffers for the encounter.

Eliza Carthy sang Seventeen Come Sunday in an Andy Kershaw radio session on 3 March 1996 that was included in 2020 on her CD Live to Air.

John Roberts and Tony Barrand recorded Seventeen Come Sunday in 1998 for their album of English folksongs collected by Percy Grainger, Heartoutbursts. They commented:

Common as a broadside as well as in aural tradition, the “amorous encounter” song was more popular with singers than with collectors, who often considered such lyrics unfit or unworthy of publication. This one became well known to Grainger aficionados through his 1912 chorus arrangement. It comes from Mr. Fred Atkinson of Redbourne, 1905.

Waterson:Carthy—here Tim van Eyken, melodeon and vocals; Martin Carthy, guitar; Eliza Carthy, violin—recorded the two tunes Balancy Straw and Whitefriar's Hornpipe with the song Seventeen Come Sunday in between for their 2002 album, A Dark Light. Martin Carthy noted:

Balancy Straw is a Morris tune from quite a few places including Ascot under Wychwood and Bledington which Liza found in the Journals of the EFDSS, and chose to play more as a reel or a quick hornpipe, and it was Tim who introduces us to Whitefriar's Hornpipe, one of those crooked tunes gracing the repertoire of John Kirkpatrick, whence he learned it. Seventeen Come Sunday is pretty much the standard way with the song but set by Tim to a Cornish tune and with the alternative ending chosen because of Tim's predilection for Rum. Lots of it.

Vicki Swan and Jonny Dyer sang The Trooper and the Maid in 2005 on their WildGoose album Scatter Pipes. They noted:

Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy and girl do boy and girl things together, boy has to go and fight a war. What happens next we can only guess, but it would be nice if boy came back and they lived happily ever after.

Ciarán Boyle sang The Night Visit in 2012 on his Hallamshire Traditions CD Bright Flame. He noted:

I am not sure where i first heard this song. It is popular in different versions all over Britain and Ireland. I was certainly influenced by Christy Moore's version however, and I took it; put a Bodhrán Hand Struck part to it and it often proved popular at gatherings, especially after a pint or two as I recall.

The Hungarian group Simply English sang Seventeen Come Sunday on their 2017 CD Long Grey Beard and a Head That’s Bald.

Hector Gilchrist sang A Waulkrife Minnie in 2018 on his WildGoose CD Gleanings. He noted:

A lively tale of a young man clandestinely “night visiting” a young lassie but being caught out by her minnie (mother) who wakened early (waulkrife) disturbed by the dawn crowing of the farmyard cock. The girl duly received her punishment, and as usual the lad gets away Scot free!
Carol [Anderson] plays the fiddle tune Drummond Castle at the end.

Varo (Lucie Azconaga and Consuelo Nerea Breschi) sang As I Roved Out in 2020 on their eponymous album, Varo. They noted:

We first heard this song sung by Christine Dowling from Belfast, who originally heard it from a recording of Sarah Makem of County Armagh. While arranging it, we decided to explore the sorrowful and dark elements of this story about a young girl being seduced, shamed and abandoned by a man who takes advantage of her.

Lyrics

Acknowledgements and Links

Transcribed from the singing of Waterson:Carthy with a bit of help by Ivan Coates. I copied Fred Atkinson's version from the Percy Grainger Manuscript Collection at the VWML. Garry Gillard transcribed the Broadside from Grimsby's version with the delightful line “You must lay me down and try me.”