The Golden Glove: A Song History

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"The Golden Glove," also sung as "Dog and Gun" and "The Squire of Tamworth," is an English broadside ballad catalogued as Roud 141 and Laws N20.[1][2] In the usual telling, a young woman engaged to a squire loses her heart to the farmer appointed to give her away, feigns sickness to put the marriage off, and goes out dressed as a man with a dog and gun to find him.[1][2] She then makes sure her glove ends up with the farmer, announces that she has lost it and will marry whoever brings it back, and so wins him as her husband.[1][2]

Leather glove with a deep cuff embroidered in silk and metal thread and trimmed with lace

Glove, leather, silk and metal thread on cloth, sequins and lace, ca. 1600. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for the song's title.

The Traditional Ballad Index gives its earliest dated text as a Liverpool broadside printed by W. Armstrong in the early 1820s, and lists many further broadside printings, among them editions from Glasgow.[1] In notes reproduced on Mainly Norfolk, the collector Mike Yates points to an older trace: Timothy Connor, an American held prisoner in England during the Revolutionary War, wrote the song into a manuscript songbook between 1777 and 1779.[2] The Victorian antiquarian Robert Bell passed on a tradition linking the story to an incident in the reign of Elizabeth I, but Yates observes that Bell gave no evidence, so this is best treated as legend.[2]

The ballad took firm root in North America, where the Ballad Index records it across much of the United States and in the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland and Ontario.[1] Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp's 1917 English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians prints it as sung by Mary Sands at Allanstand, North Carolina, on August 2, 1916, with a second tune noted from N. B. Chisholm at Woodridge, Virginia, on September 27, 1916.[3] Bradley Kincaid recorded "Dog and Gun" on September 14, 1933, and it was issued on Bluebird B-5255.[1][4] In the English folk revival it has been taken up by singers such as Nic Jones, on his 1977 album The Noah's Ark Trap, and Shirley Collins, on Archangel Hill in 2023.[2]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Golden Glove, The (Dog and Gun) [Laws N20]".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Golden Glove / The Squire of Tamworth / Dog and Gun".
  3. Internet Archive (State Library of North Carolina): "English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians" (Campbell & Sharp, 1917).
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Bluebird B-5255 (10-in. double-faced)".