The Cuckoo: A Song History

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"The Cuckoo" is less a story than a lament made of loosely connected verses; many versions are a woman's complaint about a faithless lover, close in kind to "The Wagoner's Lad" and "Old Smokey."[1] The Traditional Ballad Index gives its earliest date as 1769, citing Herd, and lists versions from southern England, north-east Scotland, Ireland and Canada as well as the United States.[1] Notes gathered on Mainly Norfolk report that it appeared on a few broadsides of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and English collectors including Lucy Broadwood, Henry Hammond and George Butterworth noted versions or related verses from singers in Sussex and Dorset between 1893 and 1909.[2]

Japanese woodblock print of a bird flying under a crescent moon above boats and masts at a harbor

Utagawa Hiroshige, The Year's First Song of the Cuckoo at Tsukudajima, woodblock print, 1831. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A Japanese cuckoo, shown in fun.

In the United States the Ballad Index records it from the Appalachians, the Mid-Atlantic states, New England, the Southeast, the South-Central states and the Southwest.[1] Cecil Sharp, who had remarked that the mountain singers seemed to have no cuckoo or other spring songs, added a footnote in May 1917 saying he had just taken down a version in Knox County, Kentucky, taking it as a sign of how tenacious tradition could be.[3] The Ballad Index cites thirteen texts and thirteen tunes of the song in Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians,[1] though the 1917 edition consulted here mentions it only in that footnote.[3]

Clarence Ashley, singing with his banjo, recorded "The Coo-Coo Bird" for Columbia in Johnson City, Tennessee, on 23 October 1929, and it was issued on Columbia 15489-D.[4] Harry Smith chose that recording for the third volume, Songs, of his Anthology of American Folk Music, released by Folkways in 1952.[5] The recording was later reissued on CD by Smithsonian Folkways.[4] Ashley also recorded the song again with Doc Watson.[1]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "Cuckoo, The".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Cuckoo".
  3. Internet Archive: Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, "English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians" (1917).
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix W149251. The coo-coo bird / Clarence Ashley".
  5. Mainly Norfolk: "Anthology of American Folk Music".