Goddesses: A Song History

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"Goddesses" appears in the first edition of John Playford's The English Dancing Master and stayed with its own tune through the seventh edition of 1686, after which later editions kept the title but set it to a different melody.[1] That first edition carries the date 1651, although Britannica notes it was actually issued in 1650.[2] The tune also turns up as "Quodling's Delight" in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, where it is credited to Giles Farnaby.[1] Graham Christian has wondered whether the dance might connect to the 1604 court masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, though he presents the idea only as speculation.[1]

Painting of villagers dancing in couples and feasting outside a thatched inn, under tall trees and a pink evening sky.

David Teniers the Younger, Peasants Dancing and Feasting, oil on canvas, ca. 1660. A Flemish village dance rather than an English country dance, shown for its subject.

The Traditional Tune Archive places "Goddesses" in a wide-ranging group of kindred melodies, used for both dances and ballads, and names "A North Country Maid" among the English songs connected with that group.[1] That song, in which a young woman from the north of England, living in London, longs to go home, has an earliest date of 1893 in the Ballad Index, which also cites Wells's The Ballad Tree as claiming the "Goddesses" melody as the source of the tune for "The Oak and the Ash," a version of the same song.[3]

Cecil Sharp included "Goddesses" in Part II of The Country Dance Book, his descriptions of thirty dances from The English Dancing Master, and pointed out that it has no progressive figure at all.[4] Sharp personally supervised a band recording of the tune for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, on April 15, 1915,[5] and the Library of Congress calls it "one of the earliest dance tunes that Sharp recorded."[6] Mark Gilston includes it in English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1, a book of dulcimer arrangements of old English dance tunes, where it is listed as "Goddesses (also called A North Country Maid)."[7]

Our book that contains the song "Goddesses"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Goddesses (1)".
  2. Britannica: "John Playford".
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "North Country Maid, A".
  4. Internet Archive: "Cecil J. Sharp, The Country Dance Book, Part II (2nd ed., 1913)".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-15918. Goddesses / Victor Band".
  6. Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "Caught My Ear: Dance Tunes in the National Jukebox from Collections by Cecil Sharp".
  7. Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1".
  8. Image: David Teniers the Younger, Peasants Dancing and Feasting, oil on canvas, ca. 1660. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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