Jolly Miller: A Song History
"Jolly Miller" is a title shared by more than one traditional song, and the Traditional Ballad Index files the English "Miller of Dee" separately from the play-party game "Jolly Is the Miller."[1][2] The English song holds up a contented miller, who owes nothing to anyone, as an example for listeners to follow.[1] Its tune was already in use, under the name "The Budgeon Is a Delicate Trade," in ballad operas such as The Quakers' Opera of 1728.[3] Sources differ on where the miller's words first appeared: the Traditional Tune Archive says they were written for Isaac Bickerstaff's Love in a Village of 1762, while the Ballad Index points to an earlier stage piece, The Village Opera of 1729.[3][1] The Ballad Index also relays the Opies' report that John Beard sang it in the 1762 Covent Garden production, and notes that later songsters and broadsides added verses, including one in which the miller talks with King Hal.[1] A different Scottish song, "The Jolly Miller," borrows its refrain line from "The Miller of Dee," and Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson recorded John Strachan of Aberdeenshire singing it in 1951.[4]
Rembrandt, The Windmill, etching, 1641. A windmill, shown for the miller of the title; it has no connection to the songs.
"Jolly Is the Miller," also called "The Miller Boy," is a play-party game, and the Ballad Index's earliest American date for it is 1903, from William Wells Newell's collection of children's games.[2] Collectors found it from Appalachia and the South to the Midwest and Ontario, as well as in England, Scotland and New Zealand, and it appears in the collections of Vance Randolph and Frank C. Brown.[2] Leah Jackson Wolford's study of the Indiana play-party traced it to the early eighteenth-century Pills to Purge Melancholy, but the Ballad Index editor doubts the two are really the same piece.[2] Mrs. Russell Vaughan of Memphis, recorded for John Quincy Wolf Jr.'s folklore collection, remembered it as a game played "kind of like a promenade."[5] Pete Seeger recorded it for American Game and Activity Songs for Children (Folkways, 1962), and the reissue's notes describe a ring of promenading couples, with extra players in the center trying to snatch partners of their own.[6]
Aubrey Atwater includes a "Jolly Miller," set in DAD tuning, in Song By Song, Vol. II, a 157-page book of dulcimer tablature, published by Atwater, in which songs gathered from great artists, songwriters and composers are set in the tunings that suit them best, many with lyrics for singing along; the listing does not say which of these two songs it is.[7]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Miller of Dee".
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Miller Boy (Jolly is the Miller I)".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Miller o' Dee".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Jolly Miller / The Miller of Dee / The Miller of Straloch".
- Lyon College, Wolf Folklore Collection: "Jolly Was the Miller (The Miller Boy)".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "Pete Seeger, American Folk, Game and Activity Songs for Children" (liner notes).
- Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. II".
- Image: Rembrandt, The Windmill, etching, 1641. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.