minstrel: carol lyric double meanings

[Tibicen]

> Though there are many folk songs with double meanings, I think most of
> the wassailing songs are just a bunch of the lads looking for some free
> food and drink, often suggesting that the listeners are better off
> financially than the poor singers ("O Maid, with your silver-headed pin"
> contrasted with the singers' wooden bowls).  The Gloucestershire version
> works its way through blessing the farm animals ("Dobbin" for example,
> is a generic English name for a horse like we might use "Fido" for a
> dog), wishing the master prosperity, followed loudly by the suggestion
> that he share such prosperity with the singers.  I think you can take
> the words pretty much at face value, but if you'd rather, I can make
> something up...

I have to disagree a bit, precisely because of the Gloucestershire
verse:

  Here's to the maid in the lilly white smock
  Who tripped to the door, and pulled back the lock
  Who tripped to the door, and pulled back the pin
  For to let these jolly wassailers in.

Which has innuendo -- at least if you sing it right. ;) Certainly I
have had audiences "get" that one.  

Anyways, back to Somerset...

> The girt dog of Langport he burnt his long tail
> And this is the night we go singing wassail

Right.  This may be absolute nonsense, but it is exactly what
symbolic, veiled political commentary has (*also*) looked like for
centuries.  Does "the girt dog of Langport" stand for someone?  Does
"burnt his long tail" stand for something which happened to that
person?

I see no particular reason to take Cecil Sharp's word on this matter;
I am under the impression he would have preferred to down-play the
political content (if any) of these songs.

Furthermore, there is a contemporaneous tradition of May Morning
carols, which *look* no more political than the wassailing songs.
Whether or not they started out political, some of them surely are now
(e.g. the Padstow May Song) not despite their lyrics but because of
them.  In the West, May Day became inextricably entwined with the
Socialist/Labor movement, from 1886 on (significance of that date left
as an exercise to the reader.)  BTW, Cecil Sharp didn't start
collecting until the turn of the 20th century.

In fact, to my mind, aware of the serious social/economic upheaval of
the last quarter of the 19th cen in England, the observation (which I
had not made previously -- thanks!) that wassailing songs are often:

> suggesting that the listeners are better off
> financially than the poor singers

does not suggest that therefore they are unpolitical.  Exactly the
opposite: they suggest they may be *highly* politicized, in light of
the fact that the politics of the time were very much about economic
disparity in social classes.  Put another way: Marxism was sweeping
the lower classes of England at that time; what does your
generalization suggest in that light?

None of which means I know any particular political meaning to the
Sommerset Wassail -- just that if someone who knows more of the
history of its place of origin were to say "Oh, yeah it's got the
following political subtext...." I'd have an open mind about it.  I
would hardly rule out the possibility.

-- Tibicen, 
   still wondering who "Aunt Ursula Birdwood" was, but has a good
   working theory as to why her dieing in "her own park-o" was such
   a big deal.

P.S. We have *scathing* political protest songs from the ~13th century
on which refer to political figures obliquely, as animals or by
nick-names.  While this case is not period, the principles are.