Annotation:Broom the Bonny Bonny Broom
X:1 T:Broom, the Bonny, Bonny Broom M:2/2 L:1/8 S:Playford (1651) K:F c3dc3d|cBAG F4|f2fg agfe|d6e2| f3ga2ga|f2FG A2GF|G2G2d3B|G8||
BROOM, THE BONNY, BONNY BROOM. AKA – "Broom of the Cowdenknowes (1)," "Cowden Knows," "Cowdenknowes," "Lovely Northerne Lass (The)," "O My King," "O the broom." Scottish, English; Air and Country Dance Air (2/2 time). England; Northumberland, Shropshire. F Major (Barnes, Karpeles, Raven, Sharp, Williamson): G Major (Ashman). Standard tuning (fiddle). One part (Ashman, Karpeles, Raven, Sharp, Williamson): AABB (Barnes). This very old Northumbrian air has been set to various words, but most famously appears as "The Broom of the Cowdenknows." Broom is a bush with brilliant yellow flowers that grows all over England and Southern Scotland on hillsides. Stems of the plant were at one time bundled together and bound to sticks for use as sweepers, hence the name 'broom' for the common implement. Cowdenknowes itself, with its famous broom, is situated on the east bank of the River Leader, five miles northeast of Melrose.
The piece can be traced back to the mid-17th century, probably Scottish in origin, or at least so believed antiquarian researchers William Stenhouse, G.F. Graham, and John Muir Wood. Stenhouse believed it was probably one of those introduced into England after 1603 with the advent of the Stuart monarchy. Graham says, "This is a very ancient and beautiful air of one strain," and adds, "That in all the versions given in the older Scottish collections, the air begins on the second note of the scale, while in Playford's Dancing Master 1651, it begins on the fifth, and in Watt's Musical Miscellany, and some other works on the key-note itself" (quoted from Glen, Early Scottish Melodies, 1900). The tune was popular, widely known in Britain, and frequently used as the vehicle for numerous lyrics; it appears, for example, set for four different songs in the Tea Table Miscellany (1724), though the earliest English appearance seems to have been in the first edition of John Playford's English Dancing Master (1651) and Playford also included it in his Musick's Delight on the Cithern (1666). Musicologist John Glen thought the Playford version "very insipid", but thirty years later a more enlightened Anne Gilchrist remarked:
In modern copies, former editors, dissatisfied with the ending, inconclusive to one who knows only the major and minor mode, finish the tune off with a return to the first phrase. ending on the tonic. (The same liberty has been taken with "Gala Water.") I have not traced this 'improvement' earlier than R.A. Smith's version in his Scottish Minstrel, Vol. ii, p. 45 (c. 1821)" [1].
Scots versions predate English ones with the melody used for broadside ballads at least as early as 1632. "Broom of crude knous" appears in Lady Margaret Wemyss' Music-book, begun in 1643. Later Scots versions of the song are to be found in Orpheus Caledonius (1725) and The Scots Musical Museum (1787). The song was mentioned in the text of the very first ballad opera, The Gentle Shepherd (1725), written by Allan Ramsay (although his work was not performed before Gay's 1729 Beggar's Opera became a hit), and subsequently in the ballad operas Beggar's Opera (see "Miser thus a shilling sees (The)" AKA "Oh what pain it is to part"), The Highland Fair and The Decoy. Even the German composer J.C. Bach (son of the more famous Johan Sebastian) penned a setting of this melody.
The name of the tune appears in a 1721 poetic address by Allan Ramsay addressed to the Edinburgh Musical Society.
While vocal tubes and consort strings engage
To speak the dialect of the Golden Age,
Then you whose symphony of souls proclaim
Your kin to heaven, add to your country's fame,
And show that musick may have so good fate
In Albion's glens, as Umbria's green retreat:
And with Corelli's soft Italian song
Mix Cowden Knows, and Winter Nights are long.
The song was also mentioned in Allan Ramsay's ballad opera The Gentle Shepherd (1725, just before "Sang X"):
Jenny sings saft the "Broom o' Cowden-Knowes",
An' Rosie lilts the "Milking of the Ewes";
There's nane like Nancy, "Jenny Nettles" sings;
At turns in "Maggy Lauder", Marion dings:
But when my Peggy sings, wi' sweeter skill,
"The Boatman", or the "Lass o' Patie's Mill",
It is a thousand times mair sweet to me;
Tho' they sing weel, they canna sing like thee.
- ↑ Anne G. Gilchrist, "Some Additional Notes on the Traditional History of Certain Ballad-Tunes in the Dancing Master", Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, vol. 3, No. 4, Dec., 1939, p. 279).