Reynardine

Magpie Mountain Minor: Reynardine

Reynardine

One evening as I rambled
among the leaves so green,
I overheard a young woman
converse with Reynardine.

Her hair was black, her eyes
were blue, her lips as red as wine,
And he smiled to gaze upon her,
did that sly, bold Reynardine.

She said, "Kind sir, be civil,
my company forsake,
For in my own opinion
I fear you are some rake."

"Oh no," he said, "no rake am I,
brought up in Venus' train,
But I'm seeking for concealment
all along the lonesome plain."

"Your beauty so enticed me,
I could not pass it by
So it's with my gun I'll guard you
all on the mountain side."

"And if by chance you should look
for me, perhaps you'll not me find,
For I'll be in my castle,
inquire for Reynardine."

Sun and dark she followed him, his teeth did brightly shine,

And he led her over the mountains, did

that sly bold Reynardine.

This is a transcription of the lyrics of ‘Reynardine’ as sung by Sandy Denny on Fairport Convention’s album Liege and Lief (1969). There had been several previous recordings of the song but Fairport’s seemed to appear from a parallel dimension. Repeated waves of cymbals break over sustained guitar and fiddle drones and an ethereal vocal slowly unfolds the enigmatic story of a werefox. The recording reflected the uncanny simplicity of the lyrics

The dark psychedelic landscape of the song draws knowingly on multiple traditions to create something dreamlike and unique.

The song had not always been so closely entwined with the supernatural. It can be found in nineteenth century broadsides, often travelling under another name, ‘The Mountains High’, and it was even being sung in Kentucky in the early 1800s. But there was no mention of a fox until 1909 when an Irish composer, Herbert Hughes, notes that "In the locality where I obtained this fragment, Reynardine is known as the name of a faery which changes into the shape of a fox."

Hughes unlocks the potential of the name Reynardine. It always had an echo of the medieval Reynard stories: the fox as anthropomorphic hero, regularly outwitting his enemies and escaping to his hideaway, the chateau Maupertuis. Now,  he is a shape shifter too, moving between forms and worlds.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, the English folksinger and folklorist, A. L. Lloyd (Bert more commonly) introduced Reynardine to the new young audiences that were beginning to congregate in folk clubs across the country. His first recording of the song in 1956 laid the groundwork. Lloyd was seen at the time as a preserver of the folk tradition though never as dogmatic as his comrade, Ewan McColl.

He was one of the founders of Topic Records, a vital platform for the distribution of folk and field recordings. That’s important as one of writers who contributed liner notes to Topic albums was Angela Carter who at that time ran a folk club with her husband Paul in Bristol (they also sang together as a duo and Angela played concertina).

Paul Carter was Bert Lloyd’s colleague at Topic Records and Bert also performed at the Carter’s club, The Bear, where Angela heard him tell the story of Mr Fox. Speaking of Reynardine on the liner notes to The Foggy Dew in 1956, Lloyd asked:  “Is he that dreadful Mr Fox in the English folk-tale, the elegant gentleman whose bedroom was full of skeletons and buckets of  blood?” Angela Carter clearly thought so: she recounts ‘Mr Fox’ in her collection of classic fairy tales and it underpins her own infamous story, ‘The Bloody Chamber’.

Bert Lloyd’s subtle rewrite of the song is a pivotal moment in English folk, arguably in the wider British and Irish folk movement. With the simple addition of a few descriptive words across the lyrics he transforms the character of Reynardine into a dangerously seductive figure while his last verse evocation of ‘sun and dark…over the mountains’ places the action in a metaphysical landscape.

The song’s popularity spread rapidly with versions by most of Britain’s folk royalty including Bert Jansch, Anne Briggs, Martin Carthy, June Tabor, Maddy Prior. Shirley Collins and Davey Graham.

It was Fairport’s version though that realised the full potential of the song to re-enchant the English landscape at a time when many musicians, possibly in a psychotropic haze, were launching themselves into the heavens from the shires  - ‘Over the hills a swallow is resting, Set the controls for the heart of the sun’.

There were dissenters. It is regularly pointed out that Bert Lloyd’s changes to the song have no real provenance. One folklorist claimed Lloyd had collected the song from a Tom Cook of Eastbridge though he never said so himself. In the liner notes for his LP of English Drinking Songs (1961) Lloyd did claim to have collected some material from this Tom Cook but academics claim no such person existed. There were a family of singers named Cook in Eastbridge, recorded several times by Lloyd, but none were called Tom: it was a convenient myth and, as a practiced mythologizer, Bert Lloyd would have known it was more convincing if rooted in a near truth. This is essentially the folk process in full flow – drawing on tradition, stressing authenticity and manufacturing, with occasional slight of hand, something newly relevant.

Stranded, at twilight,  on the platform at Saxmundham I can almost see the shifting form of a fox, flitting across the tracks. And Sam Cook, from neighbouring Eastbridge, is waiting for me on the approach.