The Old Mole: A Song History

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The Old Mole is an English country dance tune in 6/8 time, and both the melody and its dance first reached print in John Playford's The English Dancing Master.[1] That first edition carries the date 1651 on its title page, though Cecil Sharp's dance collection and a later album sleeve note both give 1650.[2][3][4] The tune held its place in Playford's book through the seventh edition of 1686, and the dance scholars Margaret Dean-Smith and E. J. Nicol connected it with the older ballad "Sir Eglamore."[1]

Seventeenth-century etching of a mole seen from above, with dark velvety fur and broad digging claws

Wenceslaus Hollar, Dead Mole, etching, 1646. A mole etched in 1646, five years before Playford's English Dancing Master first printed the tune; the etching has no connection to the tune.

Sharp and George Butterworth printed the dance again in 1912, setting it out in Part III of The Country Dance Book as a longways dance for six.[3] The melody also seems to have lived on outside the printed page: writing in The Strad in 1999, Chris Bartram reported that Harry Denslow, an East Devon fiddler who died in the 1950s, knew it from local tradition, which Bartram read as evidence of some three centuries of oral transmission in that part of Devon.[1]

In the folk revival the Albion Dance Band joined it to "Picking of Sticks" on The Prospect Before Us (Harvest, 1977), using the pair for a Circassian Circle, and Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band later recorded it on Hang Up Sorrow & Care (1995).[4][1] Dulcimer players can learn it from Mark Gilston's English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1, where it sits beside "Gathering Peascods," "Parson's Farewell" and other old dance tunes in a downloadable book that Gilston publishes himself.[5]

Our book that contains the song "The Old Mole"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Old Mole".
  2. Country Dance and Song Society: "The English Dancing Master: Bibliography".
  3. Internet Archive: "Cecil J. Sharp, The Country Dance Book, Part III".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "The Albion Dance Band, The Prospect Before Us".
  5. Mark Gilston: "English Country Dance Tunes, Volume 1".
  6. Image: Wenceslaus Hollar, Dead Mole, etching, 1646. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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