Fiddle Tunes

	Seemingly dozens of traditional fiddle tunes have bawdy verses attached to them.  Indeed, it appears that fiddlers know only these bawdy stanzas to the tunes and probably use them as mnemonics to bring the melodies to mind.
	In his monograph Folk Music in a Newfoundland Outport, Gordon S. A. Cox reports, "Sometimes a fiddle would provide the music for a dqance, and on occasions a cornet would play, but usually it was the button accordion.... The seasoned accordion player would often sing the slang [sic] words to himself that were associated with the tune, although he would never sing them in public.  For example, with 'Cock o' th' North" it would be,

	"Chase me, Charlie, I got barley
	Up the leg o' my drawers.

"For 'Road to the Isles,'

	"She's a great big son of a bitch,
	Twice as big as mine,
	O Nellie, hold your belly close to mine.

	"She had hair upon her belly
	Like the branches on a pine.
	O Nellie, hold your belly close to mine."

	Further deponent sayeth not. Cox, Folk Music in a Newfoundland Outport (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies Paper No. 32, National Museum of Man, 1980), pp. 58-59, footnotes omitted.¯
	But in addition to the William Bigford collection from Central Michigan, there is the even larger group of ribald lyrics sung to fiddle tunes amassed in the Ozarks by Vance Randolph.  (See the references below.)
	And to geographical spread of this practice of attaching scatological or ribald material to instrumental tunes, add age.  
	According to David Johnson, writing in his Scottish Fiddle Music in the 18th Century, "...many of the older tunes had bawdy titles or were associated with obscene lyrics...."  Only with the turn of the 19th Century, Johnson continues, "when people rapidly became less outspoken about sex," did the practice falter.  
	Fiddle players "could not play old tunes like The Highland lassie's lovely thing, Jockie's fu' [drunk] and Jennies fain [eager], Whip her below the covering, The bride has a bonny thing, Wanton towdie [female genitals], Had [hold] the lass till I win at her or I'll hae her awa [have it off with her] in spite of her minnie [mother] in company without causing grievous embarrassment." Johnson, Scottish Fiddle Music (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 1984), p. 244. The Highland lassie's lovely thing, Jockie's fu' and Jennie's fain, Whip Her Below the Covering, Bride Has a Bonnie Thing, The Wanton Towdie Had the Lass Till I Win at Her, I'll Hae Her Awa in Spite of Her Minnie,
	If such fiddle tunes died out in Scotland because of what Bertrand Bronson has called the "unfortunate nonce associations," not so in the American colonies.  At least two of the tunes that Johnson states fell into decline in the Old Country seem to have persevered in the new: "The Lea Rig," also known less ambiguously as "O Lassie, Art Thou Sleeping Yet?" and the familiar "Green Grow the Rushes, Oh."  Samuel Bayard collected six versions of the first and no less than thirteen of the second from Pennsylvania fiddlers.