Скачать или смотреть Jim Causley at The Bridge Folk Club – Mari Lwyd (Welsh trad), The Dartmoor Wassail (English trad)

Jim Causley at The Bridge Folk Club, 16 December 2024

Mari Lwyd (Welsh trad), The Dartmoor Wassail (English trad) Both arr by Jim Causley

Jim has joined two traditional wassailing songs; the introduction is Mari Lwyd (it’s Welsh, pronounced ‘Marry Loyd’), followed by The Dartmoor Wassail, collected by the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould (1834 – 1924)

Wassailing is associated with the extended Christmas season, particularly around New Year and Twelfth Night. Depending on the customs of where you are, Twelfth Night can be either 5 January or 6 January, and in some areas of the UK Old Twelfth Night is celebrated on 17 January

It is ancient, very probably pre-Christian, and there are two important types. One is mainly practised in the cider-making counties of England, where wassailers visit orchards and sing to apple trees to ensure a good harvest in the coming year. The other is to visit houses to collect goodies, singing from door to door through local villages

Mari Lwyd
Mari Lwyd (the Grey Mare) is a house-visiting wassail from the south of Wales, Jim told us “This is an adaptation of an old Welsh tale that tells the Nativity story. When Mary and Joseph came into the manger some animals were cast out to make room. One of them was a grey mare that was also pregnant, like Mary. The grey mare was forced to give birth to her foal outside in the cold and the snow. The foal died and the mare walks the earth eternally, looking for her lost foal
“So in the towns and villages of south Wales around the Christmas season they get a horse’s skull (because there’s nothing more Christmassy that a horse’s skull) and they go door to door, singing their wassail song, knock at the door and ask a riddle in Welsh. You have to riddle back something clever in Welsh. If you fail, as tradition demands, they go in, drink all of your whisky and cider and eat all of your food and then they go to the next house and do it all over again”

The Dartmoor Wassail
The Dartmoor Wassail is an apple tree wassail. The ceremony doesn’t just have singing, there are also various loud noises such as shouting, beating pots, and maybe volleys of gunshots being fired into the branches. The idea is to scare away any evil spirits that could be harmful to the coming crop. Then offerings of toasted bread are placed in the branches and cider or ale is sprinkled on the roots before the wassailers go to the next tree and start again

The Dartmoor Wassail is on two of Jim Causley’s albums; ‘A Causley Christmas’ and ‘Yule’

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By the way, the word wassail is based on the Anglo-Saxon ‘Wes Hael’ which translates as ‘be healthy’ and it was often used in much the same way that we say ‘cheers’ nowadays. The traditional response was ‘Drinc Hael.’ Jim Causley is spearheading a campaign that everyone at The Bridge Folk Club supports; to drop the rather feeble ‘cheers’ and replace it with the much more robust ‘Was Hael’

For more information about Jim Causley’s music and his tour dates go to –
Website: https://www.jimcausley.co.uk/
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