For your stay attention…

The transgressive art of singing for the summer

Briefly: May and June day retreats in Kent, UK | Emma Gannon on How We Live Now | My live appearances | Catch me on Martha Beck’s Gathering Pod and Sharon Blackie’s This Mythic Life

Hello,

If I hadn’t been telling you all about my expanded Substack community in this week’s newsletter, I’d have told you about my May Day activities instead. 

On Monday, Bert and I got up at 4.30am to wake Jack-in-the-Green. Jack is a kind of human hedge, an embodiment of the burgeoning verdancy that arrives in late spring. Accompanied by morris dancers and musicians, he comes to life at dawn on 1st May, where he greets the rising sun and welcomes the ensuing summer. Here in Whitstable, the Dead Horse Morris sing Hal-an-Tow, with its chorus:

Hal-an-tow, jolly rumble-o

We were up long before the day, O

To welcome in the summer sun, to welcome in the May, O

For summer is a coming in and winter's gone away, O.

The song is from Cornwall, but the phase ‘hal-an-tow’ isn’t Cornish; nobody definitely knows what it means, although a quick internet search will reveal that plenty of people are absolutely convinced that they’ve worked it out. It might refer to the first of the month, derived from the Cornish kalann and Roman kalends; it might mean ‘heel and toe’, a pointer to the dance that accompanies the tune; it might be an instruction to hoist the May garlands in fairly mutated Cornish (heave-ho!); it might be about fattening livestock; or it might be an entirely meaningless sound, like la-di-dah. Either way, the part I like is the acknowledgement that we were all rubbing the sleep from our eyes: ‘We were up long before the day-o’. Yes, we were. And I’m not sure I would have done it alone. But the gathering was a lovely way to mark the moment, and I’ve been noticing the change in the year ever since.

There’s a great history of the revival of this wonderfully odd English custom from Folklore Thursday here, and Lia Leendertz explains the wider significance of this date, including the Celtic tradition of Beltane, in her newsletter this week.

While I was watching Jack serenade the sun, I was reminded of a question I was asked at a Belgian literary festival last year: ‘England has some very strange folk customs, doesn’t it? Is it true that you burn human effigies every November?’ Well, yes, but it sounds so dark when you put it like that. It’s not quite The Wicker Man in these parts (although it is one of my favourite films and I think it stands up remarkably well on its 50th birthday).

My favourite song about the advent of summer, though, is Sumer Is Icumen In, the lovely Middle English round that is our oldest recorded song. It can be found in an illuminated manuscript from Reading Abbey dating from 1260, its original lyrics about the flourishing of life in the countryside accompanied by Christianised ones in Latin, outlining God’s sacrifice of his only son. I know which I prefer: the Middle English words are joyful, and a tiny bit naughty:

Sumer is icumen in,

Loude sing cuckou!

Groweth seed and bloweth meed,

And springth the wode now.

Sing cuckou!

Ewe bleteth after lamb,

Loweth after calve cow,

Bulloc sterteth, bucke verteth,

Merye sing cuckou!

Cuckou, cuckou,

Wel singest thou cuckou:

Ne swik thou never now!

To make a rough translation:

Summer is a-coming in

Loudly sings cuckoo!

The seed is growing, the meadow blowing

And the wood springs up anew.

Sing, cuckoo!

The ewe is bleating for her lamb,

The cow lows for her calf,

The bullock leaps, the stag farts,

Merrily sings cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo,

You sing so sweetly, cuckoo:

Don’t ever stop now! 

There are some versions that would have the stag cavorting instead of farting, but don’t hear a word of it. Spring is not a moment for politeness. 

Some songs have entered the folk cycle more quickly. I loved this long read on the legacy of the enigmatic blues musician Robert Johnson, who seems to have effortlessly surrounded himself in mythology over the course of his short life. Having lived a mere 27 years, recording most of his songs in 1937, and reputedly sold his soul to the devil in return for his guitar prowess. 90 years on, I wonder if anyone will ever be able to vanish so completely into the weft of mythology again.

There’s a theme of transgression running through this letter - the encroachment of slightly wicked human pleasure into the grey mundane. As this brilliant history of the swing (as in, the familiar piece of playground equipment beloved by children) points out, we seem to love becoming disoriented, if only in short bursts. And who doesn’t have a soft spot for a rebel anyway? After reading this piece on Guide Dog dropouts, I couldn’t help but admire the working dogs who were too distracted by tennis balls to concentrate on guiding. I’m grateful, of course, for the dogs who keep their minds on the job in hand, but I can’t help but feel that the distracted dogs are my people. 

Perhaps we should think of folk customs as a kind of distributed intelligence, a way of sharing meaning between us, encoded in symbols that are ambiguous enough to take on a different slant each year. Although I’m no fan of spiders, I was fascinated by this piece on the idea that spider webs might be an example of ‘extended cognition’, a way for the arachnids to hold information and cognitive tasks outside of their bodies (arachnophobe’s promise: there are no photos of spiders in this article, although there is an illustration which I found relatively bearable). 

But maybe you’d prefer something a bit less creepy-crawly? It turns out that parrots enjoy hanging out with each other over video chat. Their intelligence is incredible, but I have to say, it does break my heart that they’re so lonely in the first place. Parrots need culture too!

Take care,

Katherine

Website | Patreon | Buy: Enchantment UK /US | Buy: Wintering UK / US | Buy: The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US