Health Warning: This will be long, with a narrow focus, and perhaps should
be backchannel to Peter, but in case anyone else is interested, here it is.
Read no further if already bored -- You Have Been Warned!
R.
*************************
Peter,
Well, the anwer to your, "I expect you know the book _Travellers' Songs from
England and Scotland_ by Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeker (1977)," is "Not yet,"
neither that nor their later _Till Doomsday In The Afternoon_ (1986), but
one or the other or both of these may contain the answer to the question I
was trying to resolve when I segued into "Can you rocker Romanie?"
I'd been given a heads-up by someone who seems to operate on even more of a
need-to-know basis than I do (I'm currently working on a study of cant in
English writing from 1500 on) to the following effect: "Kennedy & MacColl
both give brief glossaries [of 20th C. Travellers' cant ]." (See what I
mean by operating on a need-to-know basis? Jon is even more succinct
["viscious" might be a more apt term] when it comes to providing only the
essential information and no more, and leaving it up to in this case me to
work out what to do with it.)
Anyway, I flagged _Till Doomsday In The Afternoon_ for later reference (I
assumed that was the one Jon was referring to) when I get to the local (ODU)
library, and grabbed a copy of Kennedy's _Folksongs of Britain and
Ireland_, thinking glumly that folksong was about the last place I'd find
anything relevant to what I was dealing with.
To explain this apparent paradox, I'm pretty narrowly concerned with texts
in thieves' cant, originally called "peddler's french", later "St. Giles
Greek", and by the nineteenth century "flash", before it essentially
vanishes from any sort of living speech and is only found in the pages of
dictionaries or historical novels. The earliest record of this is found in
the pages of Thomas Harman's _A Caveat for Common Cursitors_ (1567) and up
till recently, I'd have said that the last trace in any connection with
living speech was among the larrikins in Australia in the late 19thC.
Whatever, I glumly and dutifully looked at what would seem to be the
relevant bit of Kennedy, the section at the end on Traveler's Songs, with
separate Welsh, English, and Scottish glossaries, and the first two were
about what I'd have expected, basically an Anglo-Romani lexis to a greater
or lesser degree, but then there was the third glossary, "Scots and Scottish
Cant Glossary", and my jaw dropped. Mostly it was standard rural Scots,
along with slightly more than I'd have expected of Anglo-Romany, but among
the words in the list were some that simply shouldn't be there -- "bene",
"beneship", "bing -- (c) come, go, put" ... There were others, "clye",
"kenchin", "mort", "ken", "toggery" [but that's an interesting different
case], "vile", but "bing" ...
Nobody but bloody *nobody said "bing" in real life after at least 1660!!! I
won't here go into how and why it achieved widespread currency -- it starts
in Harman, is picked up by Samuel Rowlands, becomes a trademark cant term in
the poems of Thomas Dekker, and has an afterlife in Retro Cant, but even in
literary Retro Cant texts, it was already passe by 1725. And here I'm
expected to believe it's alive and well and used among Scottish Travellers?
Pull the other one, jimmy.
At that point, I had a sudden sinking feeling that it was just possible I
was wrong, and virtually everything I knew about cant was based on
insufficient evidence and I hadn't read enough and was really quite
stunningly stupid and deluded. Uh, oh, there I was looking at the
possibility of four entire years' work down the drain in a twinkling.
Twinkle. Blink.
And yes, turns out there is work suggesting this aspect of cant is
documented a bit -- a good article by someone connected with the STELLA
project at Glasgow, and a note in a respectable book on Pigeon and Creole
languages to the effect:
Scottish Travellers’ Cant/Cant/The Crack MS (Scotland)
Scots-English
Cant/Shelta/Angloramani
The secret language of Scottish Tink(l)ers or Travellers.
Except ... The scholarship was certainly legit, not just Web-gossip, and it
seemed to suggest that I'd missed something obvious, but there wasn't that
much of it, comparatively speaking, the STELLA piece was close to the
glossary in Kennedy, and the too-good-to-be-true three lines in the Pidgins
and Creoles book wasn't sourced, so just what range of evidence was it based
on?
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Riley
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2010 10:35 AM
Subject: Re: Can you rocker Romany?
Thanks for that very interesting item. I expect you know the book
Travellers' Songs from England and Scotland by Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeker
(1977) which is full of songs taken and adapted by travellers from the
standard British song repertoire, frequently changing tune and words,
sometimes through evident misunderstanding, sometimes for no apparent
reason. There seems to be a kind of phonetic play -- Barbara Allen becomes
Barbry Ellen and Burber Helen. Also truncating or garbling of narrative to a
greater degree than is normal in the transmission of songs from generation
to generation. and apparently very happy to learn and sing some quite
nonsensical results. An apparent unconcern for the more rationally
transmissive aspects of both story and detailed wording. One version of
Geordie" begins "Come saddle to me says my lily-white breast..." and later
repeats the line without the "says".
Pr
On 17 Feb 2010, at 23:48, Robin Hamilton wrote:
In case anyone's remotely interested, here's the write up of what I was
messing about with when not distracted by arguing with Jamie. <g>
Robin
Can you rocker Romanie?
I can beat a bull or fight a cock,
I can a pigeon fly;
I'm up to all those knowing tricks
While I my hardware cry.
Can you rocker Romanie,
Can you patter flash,
Can you rocker Romanie,
Can you fake a bosh ?
Stow your gab and gauffery,
To every fakement I'm a fly;
I never takes no fluffery,
For I'm a regular axe-my-eye.
Charles Hindley (ed.), _The Life and Adventures a Cheapjack_ (1876),
pp.231-232.
The latest incarnation attributing this song (or at least one quatrain of
it) to a Romany origin is in Tim Coughlan, _Now Shoon the Romano Gillie:
Traditional Verse in the High and Low Speech of the Gypsies of Britain_
(University of Wales Press, 2001):
Can you rocker Romany
Can you kil the bosh?
Can you jall the sturraben
An' can you chin the kosh?
“The first verse of a song known to most Anglo-Romany speakers in Britain,
asks: ‘Can you speak Romany and play a fiddle, can you put up with jail and
can you carve a cosh?’ The other stanzas pose further random questions,
which Tim Coughlan dissects line by line to reveal a style - at first
glance, unfocused - that works as cultural reinforcement.”
Well, no.
The problem is that the very part of the poem that naturally enough
attracted Romany speakers to it is the very one which points to its
non-Romany origin. The hawker is demonstrating his command of more than one
variety of non-standard speech, not just that he can rocker Romany but that
he can patter flash – and no respectable Romany in nineteenth century
England would deign to patter flash, which was strictly a London urban
accomplishment. And the last line of this quatrain -- "Can you fake a
bosh?" meaning, “Can you play the violin?” – is again standard urban flash
patter, not Romany at all.
Even the second line of the poem contains a concealed joke at the expense of
the audience of the original poem that works in flash but not in Romany – “I
can a pigeon fly.” “Yeah, sure you can fly a pigeon, sunny jim – a blue
pigeon!” To fly a blue pigeon was nineteenth century London urban cant for
stealing lead from the roofs of churches.
What no doubt happened was some Romanies heard the song and, attracted by
the second stanza, decided to turn it to their own purposes. In the course
of time, this origin gets lost, and what persists even today in Romany
travelling communities are various rewritten transformations of it:
Can you rocker Romany?
Can you pook a kosh?
Can you mor a gavmush?
With a knobbly kosh?
Cultural interpenetration, sure, but in this case the influence is from
English cant into Romany rather than vice versa.
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