The Fox: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"The Fox," also known as "The Fox and the Grey Goose" or "Daddy Fox," is number 131 in the Roud Folk Song Index[1]. Its ancestry reaches back to two late-medieval English poems about a fox raiding a farmyard. One survives in a British Library manuscript (Royal MS 19 B iv), dated to around 1500[2]; the other is in a Cambridge University Library manuscript associated with James Ryman, which the Ballad Index dates to 1492[1]. Sources differ on which of the two is nearer the modern song: the Ballad Index favors the Ryman text, while the Library of Congress's Folklife Today blog points to the British Library one[1][3]. According to that blog, each text survives in a single copy without a tune, and scholars first connected them with the modern song in the early 1960s[3]. In its modern form, the earliest known printing is a single verse in Gammer Gurton's Garland (1810)[4][1].

Watercolor of a fox running off with a goose while a boy with a toy gun and a girl look on, under a line of music

Erwin Schütz, Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen!, watercolor and gouache, ca. 1900. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Its title (“Fox, you have stolen the goose!”) belongs to a different, German song; shown for its fox and goose.

The song went on to be collected widely on both sides of the Atlantic. The Ballad Index cites versions from the Ozarks, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Vermont, Nova Scotia and the southern Appalachians, where Cecil Sharp noted it, as well as from England, Scotland and Ireland[1]. In England the Hammond brothers took it down in Dorset in 1906, and Cyril Biddick was recorded singing it at Boscastle, Cornwall, in 1943, as were Bob and Ron Copper at Peacehaven, Sussex, in 1963[4]. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress holds many versions as well[3].

Burl Ives recorded "The Fox" for Decca on 23 October 1945, and it was issued on Decca 23506 as part of album set DA-407[5]. Pete Seeger's version came out on Folkways in 1958 on the second volume of his American Favorite Ballads series; Seeger never named his source, though the Library of Congress observes that he is commonly assumed to have learned it from Ives[3]. Smithsonian Folkways later reissued it[6]. Peter Spier's illustrated version, The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night: An Old Song, published by Doubleday, was named a Caldecott Honor Book in 1962[7].

Find books with The Fox for sale →

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Fox, The".
  2. Arlima (Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge): "The fox and the goose".
  3. Library of Congress, Folklife Today (Stephen Winick): "'The Fox': A Song for Pete and Capitol Hill".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "The Fox / Daddy Fox / A Fox Jumped Up".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UCSB): "Decca 23506 (10-in. double-faced). (Album DA-407)".
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: "American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 2" (Pete Seeger).
  7. American Library Association: "Fox Went out on a Chilly Night: An Old Song".