Leatherwing Bat: A Song History

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"Leatherwing Bat" belongs to a family of songs in which a series of birds tell how their courting turned out, which the Traditional Ballad Index gathers under "The Bird's Courting Song" (file K295; Roud 747).[1] The Index's earliest dated copy is a Bodleian broadside, "The Woody Queresters" or "The Birds Harmony," printed in London by T. Norris between 1711 and 1732, and it adds that other broadsides seem to go back to the seventeenth century.[1] Writing about a North Carolina version, Mike Yates and Rod Stradling, as quoted on Mainly Norfolk, link it to two seventeenth-century songs, "The Birds Harmony" and "The Bird's Lamentation," and think the verse in which a blackbird speaks to a crow probably came from the minstrel stage of the mid-1800s.[2]

Natural-history painting of a large fruit bat hanging with its dark wings outspread

Bhawani Das, Great Indian Fruit Bat, pencil, ink, and opaque watercolor on paper, ca. 1777–82. An Indian fruit bat, shown for the bat of the title; it has no connection to the song.

In a sleeve note quoted on Mainly Norfolk, John Moulders called the song common in America but collected only once in the British Isles, when Peter Kennedy and Sean O'Boyle got it from Liam O'Connor of Pomeroy, County Tyrone; the site dates O'Connor's singing for Kennedy to 1953.[2] Cecil Sharp noted it from Jane Gentry at Hot Springs, North Carolina, on September 12, 1916, and Maud Long of Hot Springs sang it for Maud Karpeles in September 1950.[2] The Index lists versions in American collections from North Carolina, Florida and Vermont, among others, and the Lomaxes printed it as "Leatherwing Bat" in Folk Song U.S.A.[1] Pete Seeger's "Leatherwing Bat" appears on several of his albums, and Peggy Seeger sang it on Folk Songs of Courting and Complaint, issued on Folkways in 1955.[1][2]

Shelley Stevens gives "Leatherwing Bat" as a D-minor tune in DAD tuning in Using The 1 1/2 Fret In DAD Tuning, a Fingers Of Steel book that shows players how to make full use of the 1½ fret.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Leatherwing Bat"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Bird's Courting Song, The (The Hawk and the Crow; Leatherwing Bat)".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "Little Birds / Hawk and Crow / Leatherwinged Bat".
  3. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Using The 1 1/2 Fret In DAD Tuning".
  4. Image: Bhawani Das, Great Indian Fruit Bat, pencil, ink, and opaque watercolor on paper, ca. 1777–82. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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