Get Up And Bar The Door: A Song History

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“Get Up and Bar the Door” is a comic ballad that Francis James Child printed as No. 275 in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, taking his main text from David Herd’s collection of Scots songs of 1769 and its 1776 edition.[1] When a cold wind blows in, a wife busy boiling puddings will not leave her work to bar the door as her husband asks, so they agree that whoever speaks first must do it; two strangers out late walk in, help themselves to food and drink and plot to shave the husband and kiss the wife, until he cries out and loses the bet.[1] Child also gives a version from Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum of 1792 called “Johnie Blunt,” and passes on Stenhouse’s note that the ballad supplied the main scene of Prince Hoare’s 1790 stage piece No Song, No Supper.[1]

Watercolor of a cottage interior where a seated man reads a paper beside an open half-door as another man leans in, and a woman feeds a child

Adriaen van Ostade, Reading the News at the Weavers’ Cottage, pen and brown ink, watercolor and white heightening, 1673. A cottage door left open, shown in fun; it has no connection to the ballad.

Child places the story in a wide family of tales and cautions that they may or may not share a single source.[1] The closest, in his view, is the first story of the Eighth Day in Straparola, and he cites further silence-wager stories from Arabic, Turkish, Italian, German and French sources, in some of which the loser pays a different penalty.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index gives Herd’s 1769 printing as its earliest date and records the ballad from England and Scotland as well as from the Appalachians and other parts of the United States and Canada; it lists printings under titles that include “John Blunt” and “The Barring o’ the Door.”[2]

An English version called “John Blunt” was sung by Mrs. Seale in the Dorchester Union workhouse in Dorset in December 1906.[3] Recordings include Ewan MacColl’s of 1956, Martin Carthy’s “John Blunt” of 1972 and “The Barring of the Door” by the Silly Sisters, Maddy Prior and June Tabor, in 1988.[3] Maureen Sellers includes it, in two parts in DAD tuning, in Simply Duets, a book of older songs arranged for mountain dulcimer duet, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Get Up And Bar The Door"

Sources

  1. Project Gutenberg: "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume V," ed. Francis James Child (No. 275, "Get Up and Bar the Door").
  2. Traditional Ballad Index: "Get Up and Bar the Door [Child 275]".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "Get Up and Bar the Door / The Barring of the Door / John Blunt".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Duets".
  5. Image: Adriaen van Ostade, Reading the News at the Weavers’ Cottage, pen and brown ink, watercolor and white heightening, 1673. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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