Page:Notes and Queries - Series 7 - Volume 12.djvu/9

7th S. XII., '91.] LONDON, SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1891.

—No 288.

A LABOUR SONG.

Rhythmic song must have served from the earliest ages to lighten labour; and this not as an occasional spontaneous outburst, but as an accompaniment to toil, designed to give it the character of pastime. Sometimes as, for instance, where men pull oars together, or march in a body, or weigh an anchor, the chant takes the form of a chorus, the words often being of themselves well-nigh meaningless little more than mere vehicles for the cadenced sounds. One wonders whether the work of raising such structures as the pyramids was eased by the concerted songs of the toilers. Martial music not only regulates the step of troops, but it shortens the hours of the march. In how far did the songs of the warriors of Xerxes and Alexander and Hannibal, or of the hordes that descended from the North upon the Roman empire, help to make their long tramps endurable? Sometimes, as Handel shows us in his * Harmonious Blacksmith, ' labour supplies its own music. If the falling hammers brought no sound from the anvil, surely a vocal accompaniment would be furnished by those who swing them. What wearisome toil it would be to ring a peal of "grandsire triples" if, so far as the ringers' ears were concerned, the bells were silent. Even the measured chink of the fork against the basin whiles away the minutes the cook bestows upon her egg-beating. That milkmaids sing and ploughboys whistle at their work we most of us learned before we got a glimpse of Arcady; but the song of the vinedresser has been heard by few of those to whom, as schoolboys, he was introduced by Virgil; for with us the vine, when grown out of doors, is rarely more than an ornament to a wall or trellis, and its pruning and training are the work of the same hands that plant our cabbages and graft our roses. As to the cultivation of grapes in hothouses, such handicraft no more recalls to the observer the toil of the vineyard than it inspires the gardener with the song which, as of old, cheers the bronzed vinedresser on the sunny slopes of Southern Europe. M. Charles Marelle, from whose article on the 'Contes et Chants Populaires Francois, ' contributed some years ago to the Bibliotheque Suisse, I have extracted the following delightful ' Chanson da Vigneron, ' remarks that manufacture is destroying the song of the workman. No weaver, he says, sings as formerly Roulons ci, roulons la, Roulons la navette, Et 1' bon temps reviendra, for it is no longer the weaver that guides the shuttle it is the shuttle that controls the weaver's hand and eye. With what song could be accompany the soulless movements of the immense machinery of which he is, as it were, a mere handle? M. Marelle, in expressing his admiration of the remarkable song of which he has published for the first time a complete version, speaks of it as the most dramatic and dithyrambic effusion of the kind in the French language. The soog or snatches of it is popular not only in Burgundy and Champagne, but in Berry and Poitou, and probably some of its strains may be heard almost wherever in France wine is the common drink of the peasantry. The quaint verses, which tell the tale of the vine from the day when it is planted to the hour when its juice brims the wine-cup, can hardly fail to charm many readers of * N. & Q. ' Plan ton g la vigne.. . La voila la joli' vigne! Planti, plantons, plantons le Yin. La voila la joli' plante au vin, La voila la joli' plante! De plante en bine.. . La voila la joli' bine! Bini binons, binona le vin. La voila la joli 1 bine au vin, La voila la joli' bine! De bine en pousse.. . La voila la joli' pouaae! Pousei, poussons, pousaons le vin. La voila la joli' pousse au vin, La Toila la joli' pousae!