The Nine Joys Of Mary
Knock At The Knocker, Ring At The Bell track 13
We seem to have at least one song on every CD which has been learned from one of Roy Palmer’s books. This time round it’s The Nine Joys of Mary which we had from Roy’s Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams (now re-published as Bushes and Briars). The song was collected in 1907 from a Mr Wiltshire of Fowlmere in Cambridgeshire, a resident at the time of the Workhouse at Royston in Hertfordshire. This is another song dating back several centuries – it started life as just five joys in the fourteenth century, extended to the more usual seven by the fifteenth, then progressed to nine, ten and even twelve joys by the 1800s.
For my take on the better known 'Seven Joys of Mary' see A Folk Song A Week
Week 119 – The Seven Joys of Mary
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