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The Chickens They Are Crowing

from I Won​’​t Go Home ’Til Morning by Sarah McQuaid

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When I was little, I had a Mickey Mouse record player. It came in a white plastic case, rather like a typewriter case (and if you remember record players, you might also remember typewriter cases). When you opened it up, there on the inside of the lid was Mickey Mouse. The arm of the record player was Mickey’s arm, and at the tip of his white-gloved index finger was the stylus ... so as you listened, you could watch Mickey’s arm moving ever so slowly towards the centre. The effect was mesmerising.

One album I played over and over – and still have, scratched and battered and missing its sleeve – was Peggy Seeger’s 1958 recording Folksongs and Ballads, on the Riverside label. This song was on it, with Peggy accompanying herself on the banjo. Many years later, I had the good fortune to see her live at Whelan’s in Dublin. I shouted out a request for ‘The Chickens They Are Crowing’, and to my great delight she did it. The effect was as mesmerising as ever.

Peggy Seeger provided the chords and transcriptions for Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs Of North America, so it’s possible that she learned the song from the version there, which is credited in turn to Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, “as sung by Ben Finlay, Little Goose Creek, Clay Co., Ky., as a play-party song.” Sharp indicates that the song was collected from Finlay in 1917, and gives slightly different words to Lomax’s. However, the “boys they come a-courting” verse doesn’t feature in either book, so Seeger must have either added it herself or learned the song from a different source.

The “play-party”, as Myra E. Hull explains in the November 1938 edition of the Kansas Historical Quarterly, was “invented for the benefit of those young people who liked to have a good time, but whose parents did not permit them to go to dances.... In a last analysis, there is little difference between some of the liveliest of the play-party games and the dances. In the choosing of partners, the promenade, and the ‘Swing your pardner,’ the technique was similar. But yet there was a subtle difference in the atmosphere; and when at the play party, at the suggestion of some stranger or the chance intrusion of that limb of Satan, the fiddler, the line of demarcation was crossed, the young folks as well as their self-appointed chaperones scented the change to dangerous ground immediately.”

lyrics

The chickens they are crowing, a-crowing, a-crowing
The chickens they are crowing
For it is ’most daylight

The boys they come a-courting, a-courting, a-courting
The boys they come a-courting
And then they stay all night

I won’t go home ’til morning, ’til morning, ’til morning
I won’t go home ’til morning
I’m staying away all night

My mother she will scold me, will scold me, will scold me
My mother she will scold me
For staying away all night

My father he’ll uphold me, uphold me, uphold me
My father he’ll uphold me
He’ll say I done a-right

And the chickens they are crowing, a-crowing, a-crowing
The chickens they are crowing
For it is ’most daylight

credits

from I Won​’​t Go Home ’Til Morning, released October 28, 2008
Trad arr. S. McQuaid/G. O’Beirne
Sarah – vocals, guitar
Gerry O’Beirne – 12-string guitar, Ebow
Rosie Shipley – fiddle
Liam Bradley – percussion

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Sarah McQuaid Penzance, UK

“One of the most instantly recognisable voices in current music … Shades of Joni Mitchell in a jam with Karen Carpenter and Lana Del Rey.” —Neil March, Trust The Doc

“Captivating, unorthodox songwriting … layered satin vocals ... enthralling, harrowing arrangements … a gateway into a true innovator’s soul.” —PopMatters

See sarahmcquaid.com/about for more info.
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