Paper Of Pins: A Song History

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"Paper of Pins" is a courting song in dialogue: a young man offers a girl one gift after another, she turns each one down until money is offered, and he then takes the offer back because it is his money, not him, that she wants.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index files it under "The Keys of Canterbury" (Roud 573), dates its earliest text to 1826, in Andrew Crawfurd's collection, and finds versions across the United States, Britain, Canada, Ireland and Jamaica.[1] Mainly Norfolk files the same family under the title "The Keys of Heaven," and records Tony Engle's argument that it grew out of the Elizabethan stage jig, a sung and danced dialogue.[2]

Painting of a young man leaning close to a young woman who holds a ring in her hands, beside a spinning wheel

William Bouguereau, The Proposal, oil on canvas, 1872. A suitor offering a ring, shown for the song's courtship by gifts; it has no connection to the song.

William Wells Newell printed American versions in Games and Songs of American Children, possibly the first published in the United States, and the song has frequently been played as a game or danced.[2] Eight-year-old Emmaline Gullett sang it in Ashland, Kentucky, on June 28, 1937, in a recording from John A. Lomax's Southern States collection at the Library of Congress, catalogued as a play song.[3] Louis Watson Chappell recorded W. E. Day singing it at Dryfork, West Virginia, in 1938, and Maud Karpeles collected it from Matty Dameron in Virginia in 1955.[4][2] On commercial records, the Ballad Index lists a Bradley Kincaid version on Gennett in 1929 and one by the Vass Family on Decca in 1937.[1]

Maureen Sellers includes it, with separate boy's and girl's parts, in Simply Duets, a 123-page collection of mountain dulcimer duets in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Paper Of Pins"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Keys of Canterbury".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Keys of Heaven".
  3. Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings: "Paper of Pins" (Emmaline Gullett, 1937).
  4. West Virginia University Libraries, Louis Watson Chappell Collection: "Paper of Pins".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Duets".
  6. Image: William Bouguereau, The Proposal, oil on canvas, 1872. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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