There's A Hole In The Bucket: A Song History

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Ludwig Erk and Franz Magnus Böhme's Deutscher Liederhort (volume three, 1894) prints this endless argument as the German folk song "Heinrich und Liese," calls its melody one that everybody knows, and adds a variant from the Lahn region; in their text Liese does the asking and Heinrich the answering, until the pot needed to fetch water turns out to have a hole.[1] The same pages quote an older form from the Bergliederbüchlein, which Erk and Böhme date to 1740: there a fur has the hole, and the chain of straw, axe, whetstone and water ends with a little pot.[1] Sources differ on that date: a 1951 notice of Elizabeth Mincoff-Marriage's 1936 edition of the songbook, which survives as a single copy in Leipzig University Library, places its publication at about 1700.[2] The song also found its way into student singing: an 1880s edition of the Allgemeines Deutsches Kommersbuch prints a dialect text headed "Wenn aber!" and has the men take the opening in falsetto and the reply in the deepest, roughest bass they can manage, then go back to the beginning indefinitely.[3]

Hand-colored lithograph of a country farm scene with a well, a farmhouse, a mill, trees and cattle by a stream

Frances Flora Bond Palmer, The Old Oaken Bucket, hand-colored lithograph, 1864. Shown for its well and bucket; it has no connection to the song.

In the English song as the Traditional Ballad Index summarizes it, the questions are put to Liza, who supplies the remedies.[4] The Index's earliest date is 1949, pointing to George Korson's Pennsylvania Songs and Legends, which has two German-language versions that differ sharply, each given in English translation as well.[4] An English version had been collected in North Carolina before that: Claire Burleson and Joe Powles sang it at Crossnore, in Avery County, on August 8, 1940, with "Georgie" and "Eliza" as the pair, and the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore printed it in 1962 with pointers to German parallels.[5] The Ballad Index also lists recordings by Pete Seeger.[4]

Harry Belafonte and Odetta sang it as a duet at Belafonte's Carnegie Hall concert in May 1960, which RCA Victor issued that autumn as the live album Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall.[6][7] Under the title "Hole in the Bucket," the duet entered the UK singles chart in September 1961, peaked at number 32, and stayed eight weeks.[8] Maureen Sellers includes it in My Teaching Book For Appalachian Dulcimer, Volume Two, a 56-page instruction book for the Appalachian mountain dulcimer that pairs basics and how-to lessons with a selection of tunes, published by Fingers Of Steel.[9]

Our books that contain the song "There's A Hole In The Bucket"

Sources

  1. Internet Archive: "Ludwig Erk and Franz M. Böhme, Deutscher Liederhort, Band 3 (1894)".
  2. Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, Der Anschnitt (1951): "Kulturumschau: Ein Bergliederbüchlein".
  3. Internet Archive: "Schauenburgs allgemeines deutsches Kommersbuch (188-)".
  4. The Traditional Ballad Index: "There's a Hole in the Bucket".
  5. Internet Archive: "The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, Volume 5: The Music of the Folk Songs (1962)".
  6. Billboard (November 14, 1960): "Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall".
  7. Bibliothèque nationale de France: "Belafonte revient au Carnegie Hall".
  8. Official Charts: "Harry Belafonte and Odetta".
  9. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, My Teaching Book For Appalachian Dulcimer, Volume Two".
  10. Image: Frances Flora Bond Palmer, The Old Oaken Bucket, hand-colored lithograph, 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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