Susannes Folksong-Notizen
- [?:] The foggy dew exists in two
main versions. In the better-known one, a girl has been wooed by a
young man, without apparent success, for some months. One night, in
great distress, she comes into his bedroom and tells him that she is
afraid of 'the foggy dew' (in some songs, 'the bugaboo'). The young
man takes her into bed with him and they make love. Next morning she
regrets this, but the young man comforts her by saying that the
cause of her fear is gone. They marry (or, in some versions, settle
down together), and are happy; and whenever she smiles at him, he
remembers 'the foggy dew' (or 'bugaboo').
The other main version has until now
been known in only two examples. [...] In this version, 'Bogle Bo'
(or 'Boodie Bo') takes the place of the 'foggy dew'. In it, the
young man woos a girl who lives in the same house. He has no
success, so he disguises a friend as a spook (the 'bogle') and
stations him on the stairs. She is terrified, and rushes into the
young man's room for protection, and they spend the night in bed
together. [...]
Various explanations of the phrase
'the foggy dew' have been put forward, the most detailed being that
given by James Reeves in 'The Idiom of the People', 1958, pp. 45-57.
He concludes that 'foggy dew' signifies virginity or chastity, and
that in that version the girl's sudden agitation was caused by an
overwhelming desire for the young man.
A. L. Lloyd suggests that the
'bogle' version is the earlier one and that the phrase 'the foggy
dew' belonged to an unrelated Irish song, and was caught up by the
English one. However, Patrick Shuldham-Shaw points out that some
English versions are 'sung to variants of the tune that was
published in 1840 in Bunting's 'Ancient Music of Ireland''. It does
sometimes happen that when a different tune is adopted for a song,
the refrain of words for which the tune had previously been used is
carried over into the new song. It could therefore be that in this
case the 'foggy dew' phrase was brought into the song by means of
the Irish music.
A hitherto unnoticed broadside version is The fright'ned Yorkshire damosel, or Fears dispers'd by pleasure. To the tune of, 'I met with a country lass', &c. [...]
This broadside was published in 1689, and so is, by fully a century, the earliest copy that exists.
If the title is to be taken into account, this particular version came from Yorkshire; and indeed it seems that it is in the north that this version has survived, since
Bell's example came from Tyneside, and Gavin Greig's from Scotland. [...]
The 1689 version is less specific than the later Scottish and Tyneside ones about the conspiracy by the young man and his friend over the hobgoblin. [...] It is
possible that the very indirectness with which the trick is
indicated here may have caused this part of the song to be broadened
in some later versions, and missed out altogether in others.
The existing examples of both main
versions of the song in some respects very closely resemble this
broadside, and therefore the probability is that they are descended
either from the broadside ballad itself, or from a north-country
song that was taken to London and published as the broadside. [...]
The fullest published lists of
versions of the song are in Cecil Sharp's 'Collection of English
Folk Songs', edited by Maud Karpeles, 1974, i 410-8 and 731-2, and
Peter Kennedy's 'Folksongs of Britain and Ireland', 1975, pp. 400-1
and 428. The comments by A. L. Lloyd and Patrick Shuldham-Shaw are
in the 'Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society', viii
(1956-9), 153. (Dr. Leba Goldstein, 'Folk Review' no ???)
- [1967:] [...] the familiar and
controversial Foggy dew, about whose title-image ink has flowed and
typewriter ribbons grown faint. What is the mysterious 'foggy dew'
that so frightens the girl in the song? 'Foggy', we're told, is
Middle English for 'coarse rank marsh grass' and so may stand for
maidenhead (why?); 'dew' is a familiar folk symbol for chastity (and
many things besides); there is a suggestion that the expression is
merely a clumsy Anglicization of Irish 'orocedhu' meaning 'darkness,
black night', and Robert Graves, always ready to make a bold dash
into folk lore matters, takes this Irish notion further with the
suggestion that the blackness relates to the Black Death which may
have been raging at the time of the song's inception (though so far
we've no grounds for dating it before the closing years of the
eighteenth century) and to the black dress of nuns. So there we are:
the girl is not terrified of her coarse rank virginity; she is
hammering on a convent door begging the nuns to save her from the
plague. The version that Bell received early in the nineteenth
century offers another, less spectacular but more convincing
explanation. He calls it The bogle bo, meaning 'ghost', of course.
[...] Even The foggy dew, mild as it is, had to wait long before any
set of it was printed in full, apart from the broadsides. Where love
songs were concerned, the collectors and publishers gave all their
preference to the kind of sentimental idylls whose creation
flourished particularly towards the middle of the eighteenth
century. (Lloyd, England 200f)
- [1974:] The earliest weavers
were itinerant workers, and the reputation for loose living that
they acquired in those days clung to them for centuries. (Dallas,
Toil 85)
- [1979:] Traditional versions
have been widely known to collectors in Britain and America since
the 1890s, but have seldom been published, at least until very
recently. Of the eight variants found by Cecil Sharp, only one, with
a skimpy text at that, was published prior to 1958, when James
Reeves analysed the different versions in 'The Idiom of the People'.
A great deal of time and ink has been expended in attempting to
explain the meaning of the phrase, 'the foggy dew'. Perhaps it is
best left as mysteriously evocative. One likely idea, however, seems
to be that it is a corruption of 'bugaboo' or 'bogle bo', meaning
ghost. Yet the earliest text which I have seen, an
eighteenth-century street ballad entitled The Batchelor Brave, has
'foggy dew'. (Palmer, Country 159)
[1988:] Another street ballad of
the 1680s, The Fright'ned Yorkshire Damosel, shows one man's extreme
ingenuity in having a woman frightened into his arms by a friend's
appearance in the guise of a ghost. This may well be a conceit
rather than a true story, but the song, metamorphosed into The Foggy
Dew, took lasting hold. As recently as the late 1940s a radio
performance by Peter Pears of Benjamin Britten's arrangement of a
student version of this song caused an outcry from listeners, which
resulted in a ban by the BBC. (Palmer, History 213)
[1998:] Bogulmaroo = Buggle Bow,
or now, Buggabo, was a big black devil that played tricks on
travelers at night. This superstition goes back at least to the
early 17th century. A chapbook published in 1660 was 'The Meickle
Black Diel, or the Boggle Bo'. "Bugle Bow" was also the
name of a lost tune, c 1615. (Bruce Olson, www.mudcat.org, 12 Jan)
http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=25215
|