Polly Put The Kettle On: A Song History

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The title comes from an old British nursery song, number 7899 in the Roud index, in which a girl is told to get the kettle on so that everyone can have tea.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index notes that the song was in fashion in London around 1810, and its earliest firm date is 1841, when Dickens worked the song into Barnaby Rudge; Dickens is often credited with turning the girl from Molly into Polly.[1] The melody led a busy life of its own. Played on the pipes it goes by "Jenny's Bawbee" and has served several Scottish regiments as a tea call, and by about 1800 it was being copied into the manuscript tune books of musicians in Britain and America as a dance tune and quickstep in D.[1][2]

Photograph from about 1900 of two little girls in white dresses having a tea party with their dolls at a garden table

Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, “Afternoon tea,” platinum print, ca. 1900. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

In the North Carolina mountains, though, fiddlers used the same title for a quite different reel. This "Polly Put the Kettle On" belongs to western North Carolina and is played in G, with a modal flavor that shifts between Mixolydian and Dorian.[3] Fiddler Marcus Martin played it for folklorist Artus Moser, who recorded it for the Library of Congress in the 1940s.[3][4] Martin said he had it from J. Dedrick Harris, an older fiddler with wide influence in the region. Madison County fiddler Byard Ray learned another version by way of Manco Sneed, who also traced it to Harris, and Ray's version leans more steadily Mixolydian.[3]

The western North Carolina tune reached print in Miles Krassen's Masters of Old Time Fiddling (1983) and Stacy Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994).[3] Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II lists "Polly Put the Kettle On" as a separate title from "Molly Put the Kettle On."[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:Polly Put the Kettle On (1)".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Polly put the Kettle on (3)".
  4. Slippery Hill: "Polly Put The Kettle On" (Marcus Martin).
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".