Betsy Baker (1)

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BETSY BAKER. English, Air (4/4 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB (Shields/Goodman): AABB (Miller). Early printed versions can be found in a chapbook copy printed in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1829 (a copy is in the Harvard Library), and in the Universal Songster, vol. 2 (1826, pg. 332), where it is attributed to Thomas Hudson (1791-1844). Hudson was a London greengrocer who published a number of song collections between 1818 and 1831, apparently as a side trade, as he sold them from his grocery shop. He probably composed lyrics to existing melodies. "Betsy Baker" is in his Comic Songs by Thomas Hudson: Fifth Collection (1824). It begins:

From noise and bustle far away,
Hard work my time employing,
How happily did I pass each day,
Content and health enjoying.
The birds did sing and so did I,
As I trudg'd o'er each acre.
I never knew what 'twas to sigh
Till I saw Betsy Baker.

Vance Randolph collected versions in the Ozark mountains, which appear in his Ozark Folksongs, vol. 1, No. 117. Randolph noted that the song was popular in England and America in the 1840's and 1850's, and that it appeared in several American songbooks. The melody is employed by Alstead, New Hampshire, fiddler Randy Miller as a march. "Betsy Baker" appears in the music manuscript collection of Church of Ireland cleric James Goodman (1828-1896), in what looks to be a reel setting. Goodman, an Irish speaker and an uilleann piper, collected in tradition in Cork and elsewhere in Munster in the mid-19th century, but also obtained tunes from manuscripts and printed collections.

Source for notated version: the 1938 typewritten manuscript of New Hampshire fiddler John Taggart (1854-1943), entitled "Recollections of a Busy Life" (New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, N.H.). Taggart, born and raised in Sharon, New Hampshire, and was a onetime orchestra leader and composer. Taggart wrote in his ms. that the tunes "were all taught me during my boyhood days in Sharon (N.H.), by the various fiddlers in that vicinity." Miller points out that Sharon is in "the heart of the Monadnock Region of southwestern New Hampshire, where fiddlers and contra dances abound to this day" (pref. iv) [Miller].

Printed sources: Miller (Fiddler's Throne), 2004; No. 329, p. 194. Shields (Tunes of the Munster Pipers), 1998; No. 102, p. 43.

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