The Young girl's resolution; : together with Friendship

The first song on this broadside was modeled on Thomas D’Urfey’s “Prodigal’s Resolution; or, My Father Was Born Before Me,” originally set to a tune from the 1650s called “Jamaica” (D’Urfey 3:45; Playford 1:142). As “Jamaica,” the tune continued to appear in country dance collections well into the eighteenth century. In an article in the Folk Music Journal, William Bruce Olson suggests that D’Urfey did not select the correct tune for this particular lyric. He suggests that the lost tune of “Wet and Weary” is the more accurate match. However, Claude Simpson states that Joseph Ritson published the D’Urfey text in his Ancient Songs with the music of “Jamaica” (Simpson 376; Ritson 279).

This saucy parody from the woman’s point of view had been written by the 1760s, as it was known in Philadelphia—the first line was used as an indicated tune in a broadside of 1764 and in the American ballad opera called The Disappointment (1767) (Rabson 4-5; Wolfe, Secular Music #5460-61). A Madden slip ballad version states that the song was “sung at Drury Lane Theatre,” but it also appealed to rural folks. In about 1800, a potter named Hervey Brooks wrote out the lyrics in Goshen, Connecticut (Madden Collection 5:223 #1178; Dungbeetle 22-23).[1] A quite different tune appears with the lyrics in Andrew Wright’s Songster’s Museum (37). Wright does not name the tune, but it was well known in the 1790s as “So Merrily Dance the Quakers,” and is a more up-to-date match for this broadside text. The text appeared in twelve songsters between 1800 and 1820 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).

“Friendship” was immensely popular in America in the 1790-1810 period, copied into many manuscript collections and printed in songsters and songbooks. It appeared in twenty-six songsters between 1786 and 1816 (R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources). The author, Barnabas Bidwell (1763-1833), was a western Massachusetts native who graduated from Yale in the class of 1785, where he distinguished himself by writing a tragedy that was acted by his classmates. He remained in New Haven until 1790 and took up the study of law. In 1807 he was appointed attorney general of Massachusetts but in 1810 moved to Canada to escape charges of financial improprieties as treasurer of Berkshire County.

The usual name of the tune to which he set his lyrics was “The British Muse,” a title that may have come from the poetry section of the Universal Magazine,where the tune was published in 1767 with a text entitled “On the Force of Music: To a Favourite Air in the Opera of Atalanta” (41:326). In George Frideric Handel’s opera Atalanta (1736), the original music is a gavotta without words, played as a sinfonia before the final chorus.