James Wolfe (1727-59) was a hero replaced in Americans’ hearts and minds by another larger-than-life hero, George Washington, who arrived in Boston in 1775. The earliest records of the first text, popularly called “Brave Wolfe,” are three American manuscript copies dating from the late 1790s (Kingsley; Brooks; Bragdon). The ballad could have been written and sung as early as 1759, but there is no reliable documentation and it is not likely. In his note to the Pennsylvania Magazine when he submitted his text to be published, Thomas Paine says that he did not know of any other text celebrating Wolfe. The song is still cherished in American folk memory today. In 1814 there were already distinct variant forms for this relatively recently created ballad. This broadside and The Death of General Wolf contain two versions, each of which contains parts collected in twentieth-century oral tradition. This has nine similar verses and one entirely different verse.
Published as “The West-Country Collier’s Description of a Church” in the New York Weekly Museum on July 25, 1795, the English comic song, “John Bull’s Description of a Church,” makes fun of a country bumpkin, his perceived lack of religion, and his unfamiliarity with grand city sights. In some ways, the lyric is like “The Farmer and His Son’s Visit to the Camp” (see The Yankees Return from Camp), in which the author poses as a country Yankee seeing a military camp for the first time. The song appeared in eleven songsters between 1798 and 1812 (R. Keller).
It was written by actor and poet John Collins (d. 1808) and published in his compilation Scripscrapologia (1804) as "John Bull’s Account of a Church and a Christening, Turn’d into a Song, from a Tale introduced in one of Westley’s Sermons, to shew in what a state of Heathenish Ignorance the people of Kingswood, in Glocestershire, were, when he first went among them as a Preacher." The song may have been one of his performance pieces as it has a delightful narrative form that would be quite effective on the stage.
The language is stereotypical English West-Country speech. In the broadside version the dialect use of Z and V has been changed to the more familiar S and F. (See the seventh line from the bottom: “Like a lusty fellow, for sure and sure.”) A slip ballad copy of the song printed by J. Turner of Coventry between 1797 and 1846 is in the Bodleian Library. The chorus on that version consists only of “tol lol de rol, &c.” On the Thomas version, the chorus is longer, also comic, and invokes several chorus burdens, including “tol la re rol,” “Whack fol de ra,” and “sing didder.” It also mentions the obscene Irish song “Langolee.” None of these burdens help to establish the tune Collins had in mind.
