"Click Go the Shears" is a traditional Australian bush ballad. The song details a day's work for a sheep shearer in the days before machine shearing.
"Click Go the Shears" is a traditional Australian bush ballad. The song details a day's work for a sheep shearer in the days before machine shearing.
The enduring popularity of the song reflects the traditional role that the wool industry has played in Australian life. The song describes the various roles in the shearing shed, including the "ringer", the "boss of the board", the "colonial experience man" and the "tar boy". After the day's shearing, the "old shearer" takes his cheque and heads to the local pub for a drinking session.
The tune is from the American Civil War song "Ring the Bell, Watchman", by Henry Clay Work, and the first verse follows closely, in parody, Work's lyrics as well. It was originally named "The Bare Bellied Ewe", [1] and only became popular in the 1950s, more than half a century later.
The second verse in the original 19th-century song is as follows:
Click goes his shears; click, click, click.
Wide are the blows, and his hand is moving quick,
The ringer looks round, for he lost it by a blow,
And he curses that old shearer with the bare belled ewe.
The usual chorus of the song is as follows:
Click go the shears boys, click, click, click,
Wide is his blow and his hands move quick,
The ringer looks around and is beaten by a blow,
And curses the old snagger with the bare-bellied yoe
In June 2013, folklorist Mark Gregory discovered that a version of the song was first published in 1891 in the regional Victorian newspaper the Bacchus Marsh Express under the title "The Bare Belled Ewe" and the tune given as "Ring the Bell Watchman." That version was signed "C. C. Eynesbury, Nov. 20, 1891," [1] Eynesbury being a rural property in the Bacchus Marsh area. [2] It is possible that "C.C." was the author of the song.
There was a shearers' strike in 1891 so the publication of the song in that year would have resonated with the Australian community. [3]
The song was next published in 1939 in two Australian newspapers and then, in 1946, as a traditional song "collected and arranged" by musicologist the Reverend Dr Percy Jones. The lyrics vary widely: "bare-bellied yoe" (yoe is a dialect word for ewe) is often "bare-bellied joe" or even "blue-bellied ewe". The last line in the verse about the "colonial experience" man "smelling like a whore" is often bowdlerised to "smelling like a sewer" or completely rewritten.[ citation needed ]
The song has been recorded by many artists, notably in 1958 by the American folk musician Burl Ives, on his album Australian Folk Songs . Another version was recorded by the British folklorist A. L. Lloyd. In January 2014, Chloe and Jason Roweth sang the 1891 version of the song for an ABC TV story. [3]
When Australia replaced the pound with the dollar in 1966, a jingle that accompanied the changover was written to the same tune: [4]
In come the dollars; in come the cents,
To replace the pounds and the shillings and the pence,
Be prepared folks, when the coins begin to mix,
On the fourteenth of February, nineteen-sixty-six.
In 1973, when Gough Whitlam, the then Australian Prime Minister, visited the People's Republic of China, a PLA (People's Liberation Army) military band played "Click Go the Shears" as Whitlam stepped off his aircraft at Beijing Airport.
"Advance Australia Fair" is the national anthem of Australia. Written by Scottish-born Australian composer Peter Dodds McCormick, the song was first performed as a patriotic song in Australia in 1878. It replaced "God Save the Queen" as the official national anthem in 1974, following a nationwide opinion survey, only for "God Save the Queen" to be reinstated in January 1976. However, a plebiscite to choose the national song in 1977 preferred "Advance Australia Fair", which was in turn reinstated as the national anthem in 1984. "God Save the Queen" became the royal anthem, and is used at public engagements attended by the King or members of the monarchy of Australia. The lyrics of the 1984 version of "Advance Australia Fair" were modified from McCormick's original and its verses were trimmed down from four to two. In January 2021, the official lyrics were changed once again, in recognition of the long habitation of Indigenous Australians.
"Waltzing Matilda" is a song developed in the Australian style of poetry and folk music called a bush ballad. It has been described as the country's "unofficial national anthem".
The City of Melton is a local government area in Victoria, Australia, on Melbourne's western rural–urban fringe.
"The Anacreontic Song", also known by its incipit "To Anacreon in Heaven", was the official song of the Anacreontic Society, an 18th-century gentlemen's club of amateur musicians in London. Composed by John Stafford Smith, the tune was later used by several writers as a setting for their patriotic lyrics. These included two songs by Francis Scott Key, most famously his poem "Defence of Fort McHenry". The combination of Key's poem and Smith's composition became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner", which was adopted as the national anthem of the United States of America in 1931.
"Goodnight, Irene" or "Irene, Goodnight," is a 20th-century American folk standard, written in 3
4 time, first recorded by American blues musician Huddie 'Lead Belly' Ledbetter in 1933. A version recorded by the Weavers was a #1 hit in 1950.
A sheep shearer is a worker who uses (hand-powered)-blade or machine shears to remove wool from domestic sheep during crutching or shearing.
"Danny Boy" is a song with lyrics written by English lawyer Frederic Weatherly in 1910, and set to the traditional Irish melody of "Londonderry Air" in 1913.
Sheep shearing is the process by which the woollen fleece of a sheep is cut off. The person who removes the sheep's wool is called a shearer. Typically each adult sheep is shorn once each year. The annual shearing most often occurs in a shearing shed, a facility especially designed to process often hundreds and sometimes more than 3,000 sheep per day. A working group of shearers and accompanying wool workers is known as a shearing gang.
"The Bourgeois Blues" is a blues song by American folk and blues musician Lead Belly. It was written in June 1937 in response to the discrimination and segregation that he faced during a visit to Washington, D.C. to record for Alan Lomax. It rails against racism, the Jim Crow laws, and the conditions of contemporary African Americans in the southern United States. The song was recorded in December 1938 for the Library of Congress and re-recorded in 1939 for commercial release.
"The Cat Came Back" is a comic song written by Harry S. Miller in Christmas 1893. It has since entered the folk tradition and been recorded under variations of the title—"But the Cat Came Back", "And the Cat Came Back", etc. It is also a popular children's song.
"Blow the Man Down" is an English-language sea shanty, listed as 2624 in the Roud Folk Song Index.
"Jim Jones at Botany Bay" is a traditional Australian folk ballad dating from the early 19th-century. The narrator, Jim Jones, is found guilty of poaching and sentenced to transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales. En route, his ship is attacked by pirates, but the crew holds them off. When the narrator remarks that he would rather have joined the pirates or indeed drowned at sea than gone to Botany Bay, Jones is reminded by his captors that any mischief will be met with the whip. In the final verse, Jones describes the daily drudgery and degradation of life as a convict in Australia, and dreams of joining the bushrangers and taking revenge on his floggers.
"Now Is the Hour" is a popular song from the early 20th century. Often erroneously described as a traditional Māori song, its creation is usually credited to several people, including Clement Scott (music), and Maewa Kaihau and Dorothy Stewart.
Edwin Dudley Roberts was an Australian television screenwriter and supervising producer.
The song "All Around my Hat" is of nineteenth-century English origin. In an early version, dating from the 1820s, a Cockney costermonger vowed to be true to his fiancée, who had been sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia for theft and to mourn his loss of her by wearing green willow sprigs in his hatband for "a twelve-month and a day", the willow being a traditional symbol of mourning. The song was made famous by Steeleye Span, whose rendition may have been based on a more traditional version sung by John Langstaff, in 1975.
"Good Old Mountain Dew", sometimes called simply "Mountain Dew" or "Real Old Mountain Dew", is an Appalachian folk song composed by Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Scotty Wiseman. There are two versions of the lyrics, a 1928 version written by Lunsford and a 1935 adaptation by Wiseman. Both versions of the song are about moonshine. The 1935 version has been widely covered and has entered into the folk tradition becoming a standard.
"Take This Hammer" is a prison, logging, and railroad work song, which has the same Roud number as another song, "Nine Pound Hammer", with which it shares verses. "Swannanoa Tunnel" and "Asheville Junction" are similar. Together, this group of songs are referred to as "hammer songs" or "roll songs". Numerous bluegrass bands and singers like Scott McGill and Mississippi John Hurt also recorded commercial versions of this song, nearly all of them containing verses about the legendary railroad worker, John Henry; and even when they do not, writes folklorist Kip Lornell, "one feels his strong and valorous presence in the song".
The bush ballad, bush song, or bush poem is a style of poetry and folk music that depicts the life, character and scenery of the Australian bush. The typical bush ballad employs a straightforward rhyme structure to narrate a story, often one of action and adventure, and uses language that is colourful, colloquial, and idiomatically Australian. Bush ballads range in tone from humorous to melancholic, and many explore themes of Australian folklore, including bushranging, droving, droughts, floods, life on the frontier, and relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Shearing the Rams is an 1890 painting by Australian artist Tom Roberts. It depicts sheep shearers plying their trade in a timber shearing shed. Distinctly Australian in character, the painting is a celebration of pastoral life and work, especially "strong, masculine labour", and recognises the role that the wool industry played in the development of the country.
Sally Sloane was possibly the most important Australian "source musician" to have been recorded during the Australian folk music revival of the 1950s and onwards; a number of her songs and tunes were passed down via her mother from her Irish grandmother, who emigrated to Australia in 1838. A resident of Lithgow, New South Wales and in her 60s at the time of her "discovery" by Australian folklorist John Meredith in 1954, she was an accomplished player of button accordion, fiddle and mouth organ as well as a singer. On a number of visits over the period 1954–1960, Meredith recorded over 150 items from her; these recordings are now in the collection of the National Library of Australia, and transcriptions of almost 40 of them were included, with accompanying notes, in his seminal 1967 book "Folk Songs of Australia; And the Men and Women Who Sang Them". She was also visited and recorded by other collectors and at least one LP recording of her singing, "A Garland For Sally", was released, by Warren Fahey's Larrikin Records.
