Cider in folk song and folk tradition

The wassail songs are the real thing: a family of texts collected in numerous versions across the English cider counties and beyond, attached to an identifiable custom, and varying from parish to parish in the way orally transmitted material does. They split along the same line as the custom itself — house-visiting songs addressed to a household and asking for its hospitality, and orchard songs addressed to a tree and asking for a crop.

The orchard texts are the more specific. They name what is wanted of the tree in agricultural terms, they frequently include a direct address and a shouted refrain, and their structure suits the physical event: a group standing around a tree, one voice leading, everyone joining the noise at the end.

Several versions have entered general circulation as Christmas material, which has partly detached them from the orchard context. A carol collection printing a county wassail song alongside nativity carols is preserving the text while losing the thing it was for, and readers meeting the song that way have no reason to know it belongs in a January orchard.

Most of what survives was collected between the 1890s and the First World War by folk song collectors working in rural districts, with Somerset a particularly heavily worked area. That collecting saved a great deal that would otherwise have gone, and it is the foundation of everything known about English rural song of the period.

It also shaped the material. Collectors selected what fitted their idea of a genuine folk tradition, frequently omitted or altered texts they considered coarse, standardised variants into single versions for publication, and supplied piano accompaniments for a drawing-room market. Modern scholarship examining the original field notebooks against the published collections has documented the extent of this editing in detail.

The consequence for cider is specific. A song about drinking, sung in a cider district, was exactly the kind of material most likely to be tidied, and a printed nineteenth- or early twentieth-century text should be read as a collector’s version rather than as a transcript. Where field notebooks survive they are the better source.

Set against ale and beer, cider is thinly represented in the English traditional song corpus. Where it appears it is usually a detail of setting — the drink at a harvest supper, in a courtship scene, at an inn — rather than the subject of the song. Broadside ballads, which covered a very wide range of subjects for an urban market, treat cider only occasionally.

The likeliest explanation is distributional. Cider was a regional and largely rural drink concentrated in the west and the south-west, while the printed ballad trade and much of the singing culture that collectors recorded had a wider and more urban catchment. A drink that most of the country did not have is not a promising subject for a saleable song.

The exception is the wassail material, which is not really song about cider at all: it is song attached to an orchard custom in which cider is an instrument.

The most widely recognised cider songs in Britain are not traditional. From the 1960s a West Country popular genre developed which set comic songs in a rural Somerset idiom to arrangements borrowing from country music, and it produced material about cider drinking that reached a national audience and has stayed there. It is usually described by the label its performers used, which combined the word for rough cider with the word for the musical style borrowed.

These songs are cultural artefacts of real interest and should be described accurately: they are commercially composed twentieth-century comic material working in a regional register, not collected tradition. They also did something significant to the drink’s public image, cementing an association between cider, rural Somerset and comic excess that had not previously existed in that form and that the modern sector has spent considerable effort working against.

The folk revival has separately kept the wassail songs in performance, and revived orchard customs have brought some of them back to the setting they came from. This is genuine transmission by an unusual route: from a parish, through a collector, into print, through a revival, and back to an orchard.