Molly Put The Kettle On: A Song History

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The rhyme about putting the kettle on for tea was a London favorite by about 1810, and Charles Dickens gave a line of it to the raven Grip in Barnaby Rudge (1841); the Traditional Ballad Index notes that Dickens is often credited with turning the girl's name from Molly into Polly.[1] The Index files the song as number 7899 in the Roud index and finds it in both Britain and the United States, chiefly in Appalachia and the Midwest, and it tags the piece as both a dance tune and a play-party song.[1]

Spanish still-life painting of a fish, loaves of bread, an orange and a metal kettle on a dark table

Luis Meléndez, Still Life with Fish, Bread, and Kettle, oil on canvas, c. 1772. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

In American fiddling, "Molly Put the Kettle On" is a D-major reel that the Traditional Tune Archive calls widespread and old across the upland and Piedmont South and on into the Midwest. Many versions stay close to the tune brought over from Britain, while others drift a long way from it, and the same melody also turns up as "Jenny," "Sally" or "Polly Put the Kettle On."[2] The Leake County Revelers of Mississippi recorded it for Columbia in December 1928 in New Orleans (Columbia 15380-D), and Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers later cut their own version for the same label (Columbia 15746-D).[1][2] A version by Wade Ward was issued by Smithsonian Folkways.[2]

Not every tune with this title is the same piece. The Missouri Ozarks fiddler Bob Holt played a D-major "Molly Put the Kettle On" that the Tune Archive calls unrelated to the usual versions.[3] In western North Carolina, "Polly Put the Kettle On" names a separate modal reel in G, associated with Marcus Martin and Byard Ray.[4] Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II lists both "Molly" and "Polly Put the Kettle On" as separate titles.[5]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Molly Put the Kettle On (Polly Put the Kettle On)".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Molly Put the Kettle On (1)".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Molly Put the Kettle On (7)".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Polly put the Kettle on (3)".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".