Turn Again Whittington: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"Turn Again Whittington" takes its name from the London legend of Dick Whittington, the runaway who, resting at Holloway, heard Bow bells calling him back to the city and foretelling that he would be its Lord Mayor.[1] In Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859), William Chappell quotes J. H. Burn, who dismissed the tale as fancy and gave the real Sir Richard Whittington's terms as Lord Mayor as 1397, 1406 and 1419.[1] Chappell found the phrase used for a peal of bells as early as James Shirley's play The Constant Maid (1640), where a character calls it "the city tune."[1]

Hand-colored view of a London street with coaches and pedestrians before the columned Mansion House

Residence of the Lord Mayor of London, hand-colored engraving, 1700s. The Lord Mayor of London's residence in the 1700s, shown for the legend of Dick Whittington, who heard Bow bells promise he would be Lord Mayor; the engraving has no connection to the song.

Chappell traced a London mayoral round back much further, citing the chronicler Robert Fabyan for the story that watermen made a roundel praising Sir John Norman in 1453, when Norman became the first Lord Mayor to go to Westminster by boat instead of on horseback.[1] A round on Norman is listed in the index of John Playford's enlarged 1658 edition of Hilton's Catch that Catch Can, though it is missing from the body of the copies Chappell examined, and in 1672 Playford printed a version naming Whittington in The Musical Companion; Chappell was confident the name was changed because Whittington had become the more famous mayor.[1] He printed that three-part round, just six bars long, which he took to be an imitation of the bells rung on Lord Mayor's Day, with each voice entering two bars behind the one before.[1] The sources consulted here do not show whether the round now sung under the title "Turn Again Whittington" uses that same melody.[1] A separate song tune called "Turn again, Whittington," an air in 6/8 time, was printed in Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy in 1707.[1][2]

The round is one of 28 pieces in Mark Gilston's Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers, a 43-page book of rounds and canons, published by Gilston himself, written for groups of dulcimer players who take up the same tune one after another.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Turn Again Whittington"

Sources

  1. Internet Archive: "William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859)".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Turn Again Whittington".
  3. Mark Gilston: "Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers".
  4. Image: Residence of the Lord Mayor of London, hand-colored engraving, 1700s. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song