‘The Blaydon Races’: <i>lads</i> and <i>lasses</i>, song tradition, and the evolution of an anthem

Hermeston, Rod

doi:10.1177/0963947011398281

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Originally written in the 1860s by the music-hall artist George 'Geordie' Ridley, this song has endured to become the anthem of JOAN BEAL is Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield. Hermeston (2011) found that, in a corpus of 285 Tyneside songs from the nineteenth century, the words that most frequently collocated with lads were lasses and Tyneside, indicating a strong indexical link between the words lads and lasses and local identity. Her publications include English in Modern Times (Arnold 2004) and (with Philip Shaw) the revised and updated second edition of Charles Barber's The English Language: a Historical Introduction (CUP 2009 Tyneside and its chorus is sung by fans of Newcastle United Football Club (Beal, 2000;Hermeston, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Her publications include English in Modern Times (Arnold 2004) and (with Philip Shaw) the revised and updated second edition of Charles Barber's The English Language: a Historical Introduction (CUP 2009 Tyneside and its chorus is sung by fans of Newcastle United Football Club (Beal, 2000;Hermeston, 2011). Originally written in the 1860s by the music-hall artist George 'Geordie' Ridley, this song has endured to become the anthem of JOAN BEAL is Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The title of this paper is taken from the song The Blaydon Races , whose chorus appears as the epigraph above. Originally written in the 1860s by the music-hall artist George ‘Geordie’ Ridley, this song has endured to become the anthem of Tyneside and its chorus is sung by fans of Newcastle United Football Club (Beal, 2000; Hermeston, 2011). 2 The words lads and lasses are here used in an inclusive sense, referring first to the audience ‘Oh, lads’ and then to all the people of Tyneside ‘all the lads and lasses’.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 The words lads and lasses are here used in an inclusive sense, referring first to the audience ‘Oh, lads’ and then to all the people of Tyneside ‘all the lads and lasses’. Hermeston (2011) found that, in a corpus of 285 Tyneside songs from the nineteenth century, the words that most frequently collocated with lads were lasses and Tyneside , indicating a strong indexical link between the words lads and lasses and local identity. He also notes that the chorus of The Blaydon Races involves ‘“lads” and “lasses” singing to other “lads” and “lasses” in a complex web of community feeling’ (2011: 275).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘All the Lads and Lasses’: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear

Beal¹,

Burbano-Elizondo²

2012

English Today

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Taking as our starting-point the results of an investigation conducted on data collected in the 1950s for the Survey of English Dialects (SED) (Glauser, 1985), in this paper we look at data collected between forty and fifty years after the SED to examine variation in the semantic fields BOYS/GIRLS; SONS/DAUGHTERS. Glauser's SED data consisted of single-word responses mainly from older male informants to questions such as: ‘Children may be of either sex: they're either….boys, or …. girls.’1 (Orton, 1962: 89), but we have examined data from two more recent sources – the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) and Burbano-Elizondo's (2008) study of linguistic variation in Sunderland – in order to ascertain which words occur in these semantic fields. Whilst Glauser's observation that lad is elicited more frequently than lass is borne out, we find that, in the sense of ‘sexual partner’, where these words do not appear in the SED data, lass is used more frequently than lad in the more recent data from Tyneside and Sunderland. We also find that, whilst there is no clear correlation between use of the words lad and lass and the social class of speakers, males use both these words more than females.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘All the Lads and Lasses’: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear

Beal¹,

Burbano-Elizondo²

2012

English Today

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‘Hail, Tyneside Lads in Collier Fleets’: Song Culture, Sailing and Sailors in North-East England

Gilchrist

2016

Port Towns and Urban Cultures

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part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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Introduction: The challenges of the song lyric

West

2019

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

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At the end of his recent article in Language and Literature on Kate Bush's song 'Running Up That Hill', Massimiliano Morini warns that, unless 'the multimodal stylistician' finds ways of keeping all the elements that make up a song together (including sung words, melody, harmony and rhythm), 'the words of songwriting will remain a dead language for contemporary stylistics' (Morini, 2013: 295). It is indeed most strange that contemporary stylisticians, and particularly those of a multimodal persuasion, should be so silent on song lyrics. The toolkit of stylistics has been unpacked and applied to many other domains outside literature, but there has been very little on song lyrics. In the almost 100 issues of this journal published since 1992, there have been five articles dealing with the song lyric-as well as Morini's on Kate Bush, two articles by Greg Watson on the notion of love in the lyrics of early female blues artists (Watson, 2006; 2012), an article by Marcus Bridle on 'Male blues lyrics 1920 to 1965' (Bridle, 2018) and an article by Rod Hermeston on 'The Blaydon Races' (Hermeston, 2011). The same is true outside this journal. With one or two exceptions, stylisticians have simply not engaged with the song lyric. Where they have, they have tended to focus exclusively on the lyrics and to ignore the sonic and visual context in which the lyrics are situated (see Gavins, 2007: 61-64; Steen, 2002). As a consequence, the sound of silence amongst stylisticians when it comes to song lyrics is deafening. Song lyrics have been largely ignored in literary studies, too, with Christopher Ricks' (2003) work on Bob Dylan (Dylan's Visions of Sin) being more or less the only exception. Indeed, the extremely muted response among literary scholars to the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Dylan in 2016 was symptomatic. Whether we consider the award justified or not, it does represent a highly significant moment in the discipline of literary studies, challenging as it does the very category of literature and raising the dauntingly difficult question of value. That this moment largely passed literary scholars by is depressingly unsurprising. What we have instead is quite a large body of work on

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‘The Blaydon Races’: lads and lasses, song tradition, and the evolution of an anthem

Abstract: In this article I examine the evolution of the Tyneside song, 'The Blaydon Races', into a local anthem, with a focus on the contribution of the plurals lads and lasses to this status.

Cited by 3 publications

References 17 publications

‘All the Lads and Lasses’: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear

‘All the Lads and Lasses’: lexical variation in Tyne and Wear

‘Hail, Tyneside Lads in Collier Fleets’: Song Culture, Sailing and Sailors in North-East England

Introduction: The challenges of the song lyric

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