Click Go The Shears: A Song History

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The earliest known printing of the song appeared in Victoria's Bacchus Marsh Express on 5 December 1891, under the title "The Bare Belled Ewe" and signed only "C. C." of Eynesbury.[1][2] Mark Gregory, a Sydney researcher, turned up the verses during doctoral work on the songs and verse of the Australian labour movement, and the find ties the song to the period of the 1891 shearers' strike.[2] Earlier, Ron Edwards had suggested in The Overlander Songbook that it might date from about 1910 to 1920.[3] The melody comes from Henry Clay Work's "Ring the Bell, Watchman," a song marking the Northern victory in the Civil War that was published as sheet music in 1865; Bob Bolton, in a note in the Traditional Ballad Index, says it was in print in Australia by 1868.[4]

Old photograph of two men shearing sheep in a field, with a flock and farm buildings behind

Shearing sheep, stereograph (one half shown), c1919. The record does not say where it was taken; shown for its subject, it has no connection to the song.

Versions surfaced in two New South Wales newspapers in 1939, Sydney's World's News and the Wellington Times, and another appeared in 1946 in an article by the collector Percy Jones in the magazine Twentieth Century.[5] John Meredith collected the song in 1953, and his and Hugh Anderson's Folk Songs of Australia gives two texts, one of them set to a tune other than Work's.[6] The American entertainer Burl Ives recorded an incomplete version on an Australian tour, and Gregory dates most Australians' first hearing of the song to 1952.[2] Matthew Richardson, in Once a Jolly Swagman: The Ballad of Waltzing Matilda (2006), calls it the "second most popular bush song."[6]

In 1965, as Australia got ready for decimal currency, which arrived on 14 February 1966, the tune carried the jingle of the animated "Dollar Bill" television campaign, with new words by Ted Roberts.[7] Pixie Wright includes "Click Go The Shears" in Folk Songs For Dulcimer From The USA To Australia, a collection of folk songs arranged for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, with both standard notation and tablature.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Click Go The Shears"

Sources

  1. Mark Gregory, Australian Folk Songs: "The Bare Belled Ewe".
  2. ABC News: "Click Go The Shears dates from time of shearers strike in 1890s, newly unearthed lyrics reveal".
  3. AustLit: "Click Go the Shears".
  4. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Ring the Bell, Watchman".
  5. Mark Gregory, Australian Folk Songs: "Click Go The Shears".
  6. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Click Go the Shears".
  7. Reserve Bank of Australia Museum: "Dollar Bill".
  8. Pixie Wright: "Folk Songs For Dulcimer From The USA To Australia".
  9. Image: Shearing sheep, stereograph (one half shown), c1919. Library of Congress.

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