Margery: A Song History

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"Margery" is a three-voice English round printed in Thomas Ravenscroft's Deuteromelia, published in London by Thomas Adams in 1609, where it appears as no. 12, "Margery serve well," among the book's rounds or catches for three voices.[1] Its words call on Margery to feed a black sow on a misty morning.[2] The same group of three-voice rounds includes "Three Blind Mice," and among the four-voice rounds is "Go to Joan Glover," which also turns up in Mark Gilston's collection.[1][2]

Etching of three pigs feeding at a wooden trough beside a shed and a plank fence.

Karl Bodmer, Three Pigs Near a Fence, etching, ca. 1860. Pigs at a trough, shown in fun for the round's black sow.

Ravenscroft (born about 1582, died about 1633) brought out Deuteromelia, with its 31 pieces, in the same year as Pammelia, a book of a hundred catches and rounds that Britannica calls the first anthology of its kind.[3] In Britannica's view his secular collections served ordinary middle-class singers rather than the cultivated audience for madrigals and ayres, and they hold much for historians of popular music.[3]

Mark Gilston includes "Margery" in Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers, his book of rounds, canons and circular songs for several dulcimer players starting at different times, and says he learned it from his friend Carly Gewirz.[4][2]

Our book that contains the song "Margery"

Sources

  1. IMSLP: "Deuteromelia (Ravenscroft, Thomas)".
  2. Mark Gilston: "Playing A Round with Dulcimers - Lyrics".
  3. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Thomas Ravenscroft".
  4. Mark Gilston: "Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers".
  5. Image: Karl Bodmer, Three Pigs Near a Fence, etching, ca. 1860. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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