Let No Man Steal Your Thyme: A Song History
"Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" belongs to a family of folk songs in which thyme stands for a young woman's virginity, and her garden becomes the setting for a tale of seduction and regret.[1] How many songs that family holds is a matter of classification: the Traditional Ballad Index keeps several thyme songs apart but cautions that they share a plot and refrain and trade verses so freely that fragments are hard to sort, and it notes that many collectors, Steve Roud among them, simply treat the whole group as forms of "The Seeds of Love."[1] Mainly Norfolk accordingly files this title under Roud 3, together with "The Sprig of Thyme" and "The Bunch of Thyme."[2] In a note reproduced there, Rod Stradling dates the earliest printings of the Roud 3 song to the eighteenth century and lists nineteenth-century broadside printers from London and Edinburgh to Bristol and Ledbury, although another note on the same page, by John Howson, finds broadside copies surprisingly scarce.[2] A Lancashire tradition, which Robert Bell put in print in 1877, holds that a Mrs Fleetwood Habergham wrote the related "Seeds of Love" in 1689, but Mike Yates found nothing solid to support it and Roy Palmer judged the story very probably groundless.[3]
Camille Pissarro, Two Women in a Garden, gouache on silk, 1888. Women in a garden, shown for the song's garden; it has no connection to the song.
By Stradling's account, most English folk-song collectors noted down at least one version.[2] The very first song Cecil Sharp collected, in September 1903 at Hambridge in Somerset, was "The Seeds of Love," sung by the gardener John England.[3] Ralph Vaughan Williams took down thyme songs in Essex in 1904 and Cambridgeshire in 1908, Sabine Baring-Gould gave one in Songs of the West, and the Lincolnshire singer Joseph Taylor sang "Sprig o' Thyme" into Percy Grainger's wax-cylinder phonograph, a session that the notes gathered on Mainly Norfolk date variously to 1906 and 1908.[2] The songs crossed the Atlantic as well: the Ballad Index cites texts printed in collections from the Ozarks, Ohio, Texas, East Tennessee and Nova Scotia, and in Cox's Folk Songs of the South.[1]
Under the title "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme," Mainly Norfolk lists recordings by Isla Cameron in 1958, by a 19-year-old Anne Briggs at the Edinburgh Festival in 1963, by Pentangle, who opened their first album with it in 1968, and by June Tabor on Angel Tiger in 1992.[2] The mountain dulcimer book From Ditties To Dirges, by Janene Millen and Shawn McCurdy, includes it in DAD tuning among its ballads, lullabies, laments, sea shanties and courting songs, most of them from the British Isles; all but one of its arrangements are for solo dulcimer, and singers get song sheets with lyrics and suggested chords.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "In My Garden Grew Plenty of Thyme".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Sprig of Thyme / The Bunch of Thyme / Let No Man Steal Your Thyme / Come All You Garners Gay (Roud 3)".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Seeds of Love / I Sowed the Seeds of Love (Roud 3; G/D 6:1180)".
- Janene Millen And Shawn McCurdy: "From Ditties To Dirges".
- Image: Camille Pissarro, Two Women in a Garden, gouache on silk, 1888. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.