Can we track down the earliest bush ballad?
This characteristic genre of Australian folksong evolved alongside the colonial pastoral industries of New South Wales, southern Queensland and Victoria. Basically, these are songs about white blokes in the bush with sheep, horses and bullocks, often set to American popular tunes of the times, in four-line stanzas, mostly with a chorus. They quickly became established as characteristic expressions of the Australian pioneering experience.
But which was the first? ‘
The pastoral industry didn’t get underway until after the Blue Mountains were crossed and the western plains opened up and as settlers began moving north to what is now Queensland and south to what is now Victoria. So, the earliest isn’t likely to be until the 1830s, allowing a decade or two for the lifestyle, values and attitudes implicit in the bush ballad to evolve. Around this time we have a possible precursor in the form of ‘Bold Jack Donohoe’, the convict bushranger killed in 1830. It is not a bush ballad itself but is based on the British broadside ballad model, a form which also fed into the bush ballad.
Russel Ward, a historian and so having an occupational imperative for establishing dates, implied (though that’s all) that ‘The Old Bullock Dray’ is from the 1840s (in his Penguin Book of Australian Ballads).
The classic ‘Click Go the shears’ is set to an American Civil War tune, suggesting the mid-1860s as a date, though it could be later. By this time the bush ballad was in full flower.
But by the late 1880s-early 1890s, ‘Banjo’ Paterson was collecting them, fearing they were in danger of disappearing. He eventually published his Old Bush Songs, by which time the bush ballad, at least as a song, was a bit of an artefact (though the style lived on in the reams of verse published by squadrons of bush rhymesters in local newspapers and some reciters, etc. up to World War 2 and even a little after).
So, I’m going for the 1840s as the rough date of the first sung bush ballad. Any advance on that?
GS
1 comment:
Your comments on the ‘first bush song’, or at least early songs that were sung about and around the bush, got me thinking. It is, of course, an impossible ask - but a fun one to consider. No doubt, the first settlers sung for their own amusement and occasionally for others, and would have sung about life in their new adventure. It was an era when most people sang. The settlers would have also created parodies to songs they knew from back home. The songs played a unique role back then as entertainment, a matter of record and a certain nostalgic view of life. Some would have been considered ‘family songs’. It would have been difficult for most homemade songs to get wide oral circulation as folks back then didn’t move around too much.
Without going into the ‘what constitutes a folk song’ it has to be said that there were probably hundreds of songs which, had they survived, would have been candidates for ‘first song’. Fact is, there was no thought of ‘collecting’ of songs until the late eighteen nineties so we can assume there were songs but they disappeared into time. Most from the earliest songs we now know came from newspaper publication. We need to raise a toast to ‘Banjo’ Paterson, ‘Bill Bowyang’, the various field collectors, and, of course, TROVE’s digitisation program. And a special mention here to Mark Gregory and his diggings!
I think Russel Ward’s idea of the Old Bullock Dray is fanciful and, probably based on the verse which mentions the ‘depot’ - the Female Factory. To me, the song is probably later and maybe from a musical performance on the goldfields - it smacks of it.
As for Click Go The Shears - we now know it was probably written in 1891 when it surfaced in a Victorian newspaper. It had a few more verses and was popularised (via Percy Jones) by Burl Ives. Although I ‘collected’ a few verses from different sources, everyone knew it through Ives. Other collectors had similar results, it was never really considered a classic ‘bush song’. It was extremely popular as a barn dance. The many songs from the 1850s onwards, especially the gold fields songs, don’t comfortably fall into the ‘bush song’ category. This gets us back to the question - what defines a bush song. (Suggested reading for a few answers - ‘Old Bush Songs’ 2005 centenary edition (ABC Books) edited by Graham Seal and yours truly. It shows up occasionally on abebooks etc. (also available from Verandah Music https://verandahmusic.blogspot.com/p/store.html)
I don’t think I’d suggest what was the first bush song - although tempted to cite something like The Carrier’s Song (Rain! Rain! Rain!) or Colonial Experience (which was definitely early). The romantic side of me would suggest The Drover’s Dream because of its use of bush animals. Nah, best not go there….
Warren Fahey
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