What are the words to music in relation to sheep that most immediately come to mind? I think these four titles/first lines are contenders: ‘Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep’; ‘Baa baa black sheep, Have you any wool?’; ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night, All seated on the ground’; ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’.
Is there anything ‘telling’ to these, about sheep and their world and context?
The first indicates that sheep get lost; and in this instance says a human is at fault for this. The second says that wool-provision is seen as a function of sheep. And as the words continue, wool is shown as being a widely-wanted product. The third portrays the position of a shepherd to sheep as being to stay with them, care for them, night as well as day. The fourth links the shepherd function to a religion, Christianity: it attributes the role of shepherd to the religion’s highest entity and says that that entity acts in role of shepherd to a person.
The first two are nursery rhymes. The third is a Christmas carol. The fourth is a hymn.
Let us look at the data and circumstances of these four pieces, to see what else may be being ‘said’ or indicated.
Item one is a rhyme from the early nineteenth century, and its most usual tune was first recorded by James William Elliott in the later nineteenth century. Item two is also a rhyme, being of the mid- eighteenth century, and which is sung to a version of a later eighteenth-century tune from France. Both these two rhymes are nursery rhymes, and so overtly for children. It can be conjectured, by the use of the word nursery - therefore depicting a specific function room, and which a humble dwelling would be unlikely to include - that the audience for the nursery rhymes would be children of middle-, or higher-, class families. These children might, too, have the benefit of a nanny taking them on walks to see sheep in a field, or else within the bounds of their family estate.
Item three has undeniable noble lineage, both in its writer and composer: the words of the carol were penned in, or not long before, 1703 by Nahum Tate, the then Poet Laureate, and the carol’s tune came from an opera by George Frideric Handel. Though its title itself does not convey this, the carol is religious of type, and so it links (the Christian) religion and the world of sheep. The title depicts shepherding as a 24/7 activity.
Item four is a version of the words ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ which begin the first verse of Psalm 23, dated about 1000 BC. Those words are in the Christian Old Testament. The title of the hymn, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’, is attributed to Francis Rous, a Puritan, and dated to about 1650. The hymn, too, makes the Christian religion - ovine world link. In contrast to the antiquity of words of its essential title, the two pieces of music deployed for the hymn are (later) nineteenth and (early) twentieth century. These tunes are ‘Crimond’ believed to be by Jessie Seymour Irvine and ‘Brother James’s Air’ by James Leith Macbeth Bain. As the names suggest, both people were Scottish.
The four items are nowadays, and have been so for some while at least, well-known. They derive from a quite wide range of times. Can any viewpoints about sheep be divined; and which might represent attitudes of their ages?
The fourth in its title words connects to Christianity, and, in the words’ founding form, to a pre-Christ time. The format of title and words for the actual hymn were provided during an age of political and religious upheaval and re-evaluation. The time was, to an extent, the moment of society starting to become ‘modern’. In the world of agriculture, Enclosure, consolidating land into larger units, and rendering control of the units, was a process completed. The scene was set for The Agricultural Revolution to commence. But, to obtain freedom of roaming and herding must have been getting more difficult. Regarding the two tunes most often used with the words, though written later than the words, these convey and represent ‘tradition’.
Item three, a carol whose words are about the shepherds at the time of The Nativity, has its context of composition - word and tune - as the eighteenth century. In a sense this was a more worldly time before the Christian revivalism that came in the later nineteenth century. Prosperity produced things being done by society’s higher echelons for purposes of show, pleasure and enjoyment. Landscapes on estates were made to look beautiful, and a certain picturesqueness and romanticism was displayed. Farming too had to look good as part of this. Sheep fitted in fine and elegantly on estate land, on pasture beyond the ha-ha. So, music by Handel, the composer of the ‘While Shepherds watched their flocks’ carol, fits suitably; as does that the carol’s words are by the Poet to Royalty.
Item two shares with the carol that it was created in the eighteenth century. Its demeanour is one of approachability. Any child could sing it, any child, or grown-up, could understand it. Its dimension of more exclusiveness, as has been said, comes from its designation, as a nursery rhyme, and the associations attendant.
Item one is of the nineteenth century, and is simple of word and music. The words of the whole rhyme have an overt touch of sweetness, but there is bite and snobbery, probably unconscious, in its hierarchy portrayed as the lines go on, to, ‘one for the master, one for the dame, one for the little boy who lives down the lane’. The nurseries in which this rhyme was sung would likely have had Kate Greenaway friezes around their walls. And, somehow the speculation is whether the rhyme’s author had ever actually seen a sheep.
All four chosen items are from various points in the past. Many of the ‘worlds’ and instances they portray - of shepherds being with their sheep all the time; of sheep roaming open land; of times of wool being an everyday product, much-needed and lucrative; of sheep having a place as actors in a romantic scene; of sheep being a specially-honoured animal for their connection to the Christian religion and special place in it, and shepherds likewise - are past and gone, or largely gone. Coming though in the items, either due to key and important association with a religion, or through wool being a product giving prosperity, is of in the past there being status for sheep, and for shepherds. But, how much can one say this now? Most of pictures these four chosen items paint have little similarity or chime with what the tenor and style is of much of the sheep world today - the impersonality and industrial style of the factory farm, for example. And yet, all this notwithstanding, certain verities of the past do remain and continue. Humans are still guiding and caring for sheep. Sheep still get lost, and they still are searched for. But it is still seriously to be questioned whether sheep are valued now as highly as they have been in the past of the words and tunes discussed here.
5th March 2021