Henry's Songbook

My name's Polly Parker, I come o'er from Worsley
My mother and father work down the coal-mine
Our family is large, we have got seven children
So I am obliged to work down the same mine
And as this is my fortune I know you'll feel sorry
That in such employment my days I must pass
But I keep up my spirits, I sing and look cheerful
Although I am but a poor collier lass

By the greatest of dangers each day I'm surrounded
I hang in the air by a rope or a chain
The mine may give in, I may be killed or wounded
Or perish by damp or the fire of a flame
But what would you do if it weren't for our labours
In greatest starvation your days you would pass
For we would provide you with life's greatest blessing
So do not despise a poor collier lass

All the day long you may say we are buried
Deprived of the light and the warmth of the sun
And often at night from our beds we are hurried
The water is in and barefoot we run
And though we go ragged and black are our faces
As kind and as free as the best we'll be found
And our hearts are more wide than your lords' in high places
Although we're poor colliers that work underground

I'm now growing up fast, somehow or another
There's a young collier lad runs strange in my mind
And in spite of the talking of father and mother
I think I should marry if he is inclined
But should he prove surly and will not befriend me
Another and better chance may come to pass
And my friends here I know to him will recommend me
And I'll be no longer a poor collier lass

As sung by Frankie Armstrong

[1975:] John Harkness, of 121 Church Street, Preston, published a broadside of this in the early 1850s. It's a touching portrait of the kind of women and girls who worked in the coal-pits. Some writers present them as a coarse and brutalized lot, but their songs, and their testimony to the various Commissions of Enquiry of the time, show otherwise. Frankie Armstrong admires the quiet dignity of this song, and suggests that - though different in timbre - it has something of the strength of the songs of Molly Jackson and other women ballad-makers of the American coalfields in the inter-War period. The broadside didn't specify a tune, so one has been fitted by A.L.Lloyd. (A.L.Lloyd, notes Frankie Armstrong, 'Songs and Ballads')