Rosin The Beau: A Song History

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"Rosin the Beau" (also spelled "Rosin the Bow") is a drinking song named for its title character, Old Rosin, and where it came from is genuinely uncertain. It was printed on both English and Irish broadsides in the nineteenth century, and folk-song researcher Mike Yates left it an open question whether it was an Irish song carried to England by traveling singers or an English song to begin with.[1] The English singer A. L. Lloyd, who put it on his 1956 album English Drinking Songs, suggested, tentatively, that Old Rosin had been a carousing countryman of the eighteenth century.[1] In America a version was published in 1838 as a comic song dedicated to the members of the Falcon Barge; the Traditional Tune Archive notes that this may be one of the earliest printings, but that the words and air are thought to be older, probably from Britain or Ireland.[2]

Watercolor of an old fiddler playing in a tavern with three men behind him, mid-19th century

Johannes Hendrik van West, A Fiddler in a Tavern, with Three Men in the Background, watercolor over graphite, mid-19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A tavern fiddler of the period; the drawing is not connected to the song.

The melody proved adaptable. On the minstrel stage it was a frequent song of a character created by the white blackface performer Jim "Daddy" Rice.[2] In 1850 it appeared in the shape-note tunebook The Sacred Harp as the hymn "Sawyer's Exit," whose words are credited to an Alabama Methodist preacher said to have written them on the day he died and asked that they be sung to this tune.[2] From the 1840s into the Civil War years it was a favorite tune for American election songs.[3] One example is "Lincoln and Liberty," written to this tune for the 1860 presidential campaign[3] and printed that year in Hutchinson's Republican Songster.[4] Lloyd observed that in America the tune is best known as the melody of "Acres of Clams."[1]

The tune has had a long life as dance and fiddle music too. It was reported as a common tune at country dances in Orange County, New York, in the 1930s, and the County Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman recorded a related version in New York under the title "Men of the West."[2] For mountain dulcimer players, it is one of the 75 tunes in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, his collection of common jam-session tunes for the instrument.[5]

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Sources

  1. Mainly Norfolk: "Rosin the Beau / Rosin the Bow".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Old Rosin the Beau".
  3. Smithsonian Folkways: "Songs of the Civil War" (FH 5717) liner notes.
  4. Internet Archive: "Hutchinson's Republican Songster, for the Campaign of 1860".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".