Pop! Goes The Weasel: A Song History

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"Pop! Goes the Weasel" is a dance tune in 6/8 time, known in English, American and Canadian tradition.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive notes a dance by that name in an Essex commonplace book of about 1830, and a version in the 1850 manuscript collection of William Winters, a shoemaker and fiddler.[1] Printed copies under the title appear in 1853, possibly first in London that March and in American editions the same year.[1] One 1853 American arrangement in the Library of Congress says the dance had been "lately introduced at Her Majesty's and Nobilities balls."[2] A Glasgow sheet from James Lindsay, dated to the 1850s, gives the melody with no words at all, which the Traditional Ballad Index takes as a hint that the music was already traditional.[3]

A painting of an elderly woman at a spinning wheel beside an old man seated in a chair in a dim Dutch room.

Quirijn van Brekelenkam, The Spinner, oil on wood, 1653. A woman at a spinning wheel, shown for the spinner's-reel explanation of the "weasel"; it has no connection to the tune.

The words have never been fixed; the Ballad Index observes that almost any verses will do so long as the title line comes round.[3] Sheet music published in New York in 1853 used the refrain for topical verses on temperance and on relations between Uncle Sam and John Bull.[3] In the United States the rhyme was also turned into a blackface minstrel song, and the Library of Congress holds a few arrangements of that version, some with political verses added.[2] According to the Ballad Index, the verses about a monkey and a cobbler's bench, now the best known, do not turn up until the twentieth century.[3] What the "weasel" was is uncertain: the Ballad Index reports general agreement that in the early versions it was a hatter's tool, and that to "pop" it meant to pawn it, while a Library of Congress writer offers the spinner's weasel, a yarn-measuring reel that pops once the set length of yarn has been wound, as one possible source of the "pop."[3][2]

In America the tune was a favorite of both armies in the Civil War and was printed in Elias Howe's United States Regulation Drum and Fife Instructor of 1861, and in New England it served as a contra dance.[1] Laura Ingalls Wilder brought it into Little House in the Big Woods.[1] The Victor Military Band closed a 1918 medley with it, and in 1966 Alan and Karen Singer Jabbour recorded the Virginia fiddler Henry Reed playing it.[2] Judy House sets it in DAD tuning in Beginning Lessons For The Mountain Dulcimer, a 112-page beginner's book of fourteen lessons that teach strumming, fretting, counting and familiar tunes, which comes with MP3 recordings of the songs and exercises at 60 and 80 beats per minute.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Pop! Goes The Weasel"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Pop Goes the Weasel".
  2. Library of Congress, In the Muse: "Sheet Music Spotlight: Pop Goes the Weasel".
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Pop Goes the Weasel".
  4. Judy House: "Beginning Lessons For The Mountain Dulcimer".
  5. Image: Quirijn van Brekelenkam, The Spinner, oil on wood, 1653. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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