They all have a mate but me

AKA	The fox and the hare

Lyrics

JB Geoghegan

Music

JB Geoghegan

Roud

RN1140

Kind Christians all, on you I call, 
If to pity you feel inclined
You're care bestow on a fellow full of woe, 
Who is almost off his mind
Six wives I've wed, but they've all gone dead, 
My love was labour in vain
For I've married and I've buried, till I'm very nearly worried
And I'm sick with women on the brain.

There's the fox and the hare
And the badger and the bear
And the birds on the Greenwood tree
And the pretty little rabbits
So engaging in their habits
And they've all got a mate but me.

The first on the page is little Sally Sage, 
She once was a lady's maid
But she ran away on a very dark day, 
With a fellow in the fried fish trade
The next was a cook, oh a beauty with a hook, 
And I'll tell you the reason why
For a leg she had a stump, on her back was a hump
And she'd got a little squint in her eye.

Another one to charm was a girl on a farm, 
Well versed in harrows and ploughs
She guarded the rigs of a lot of little pigs
And squeezed new milk from the cows
She was sixteen stone, all muscle and bone
And she looked with a awful leer
And she would have been mine but fell in a decline
Through swallowing mouse in her beer.

Then another one came, oh a right jolly dame
And her purse was as long as my arm
All full of yellow gold, such a sight to behold
Would the heart of a miser warm
And her only sin was a love of gin
And it brought our hopes to a wreck
For she slipped with her heel on a bit of orange-peel
Fell down and broke her blessed neck

I could add to the score full half a dozen more
For the list is a long way round
One went o'er the sea for a better chap than me
And some of them were hanged or drowned
And the last I had through drink went mad
In vain I tried to stop her
And sad was my dismay to discover that
She'd been boiled to death in a copper.

A song collected from folk source singers on both sides of the Atlantic, and found in a number of broadsides and songbooks. As a folksong its more often referred to as The Fox and The Hare,

It was originally sung in the halls by Sam Torr, written by our old friend JB Geoghegan. The British library catalogue has They all have a mate but me (song begins: “kind Christians all”) written by Joseph Geoghegan, published London 1876.

Sam Torr (1849-1923) was a successful music hall comedian in the style of a lion comique. He started singing in the “Free and Easies” as a teenager and was later famous for a song called “On the back of daddy O” in which he would appear to be riding on the back of a life-sized dummy. For a while he turned to managing in the halls, and famously worked with Joseph Merrick “the elephant man”. He returned to performing in the early 20th century, but also managed the Malt Cross in Nottingham.

Sources:

• Lyrics from monologues.co.uk
• VWML records
• Emily Sparks sings a fragment, collected by Desmond and Shelagh Herring.
• British Library catalogue entry.

The Fox and The Hare performed by Jimmy Crowley and Stokers Lodge.

Last Updated on October 28, 2020 by John Baxter | Published: February 28, 2020