Hares on the Mountain

This song is composed of two distinct parts, "Hares on the Mountain" and "The Knife in the Window", both of which have been collected as distinct songs. It may be that it started life as two different songs which were amalgamated by singers. A third theme, "Crawling and Creeping", apparently an adaptation of the "Knife in the Window" motif, occurs in the American tradition. "Hares on the Mountain" In this theme the singer imagines what would happen if young maidens (or in some cases young men) were transformed into various creatures or plants, and describes the response of the opposite gender: The imagined transformations include hares on the mountain, sheep in the meadow, reeds a'growin', and others. One more modern version goes: There is a nonsense refrain which varies from singer to singer. "Knife in the Window" This section starts as a dialogue between two young lovers, demonstrating his incompetence and her initial caution and subsequent willingness (if somewhat blunt at times): Most versions involve him cutting knots (at her instigation) in either his breeches or her "small things", hence the title: The song usually ends with the couple in bed together: though one version, collected in Virginia from Asa Martin and titled "Lightning and Thunder", ends with the birth of a baby: A number of more explicit versions of this song have been collected under the title "Roll Your Leg Over". "Crawling and Creeping" In this reworking of more risque versions of the song like "Roll Your Leg Over me" the narrator dreams that he "went a-crawling and a-creeping And I crawled in the room where my baby was sleeping". She wakes up and screams, he is arrested and sentenced to nine months in jail. Each verse ends in the phrase "And I never want to do it again." or something similar. The song ends with a warning: ==Early versions==

Broadsides and early printed versions A tune for the song was published under the name in The Complete Collection of Irish Music by George Petrie, published in London in 1902, under the title "If All the Young Maidens were Blackbirds and Trushes" (sic). No chap book or broadside ballads have come to light containing verses from either the "Hares on the Mountain" or the "Knife in the Window". which he published in his Folk Songs From Somerset, seemingly the source of many popular recordings of the song. Dozens of traditional versions of the song have been recorded, including two versions available on the British Library Sound Archive: a Yorkshire version recorded by Steve Gardham and sung by Dorothy Bavey and a Somerset version recorded by Bob Patten and sung by Charlie Showers. Other recorded versions by traditional singers include a rendition of "Hares on the Mountain" by Northamptonshire singer Jeff Wesley and a version of "Knife in the Window" by Suffolk singer Harry List. ==Popular recordings==

Many revival singers have covered this song, beginning with Shirley Collins / Davey Graham in 1964, which she seemingly based on the 1906 Bridgwater version collected by Cecil Sharp recorded a version of this variant, as did Nashville-based rock band All Them Witches on their EP Lost and Found, and Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell on their six-track EP The North Farm Sessions (2010) who used an altered version of the same tune. The Local Honeys (Linda Jean Stokley and Montana Hobbs) recorded a live version at SomerSessions in Kentucky in 2016. Radie Peat & Daragh Lynch of Lankum recorded a popular version in 2018 inspired by Shirley Collins, and the English indie rock trio Alt-J recorded a variation of Hares on the Mountain for the soundtrack of the 2017 movie Bright. Fern Maddie recorded her version of the song in 2022. Nora Brown has also recorded her own version with Band in a Box in 2019. Some musicians recorded completely different versions of the song originating from different sources, including Steeleye Span, Frankie Armstrong and Chris Wood / Andy Cutting. ==Discussion==

According to the folk song collector John Howson, the song "is sometimes attributed to Samuel Lover (1797–1865), who included it in his novel Rory o’ More published in 1837. However, it probably predates Lover's book...." Roy Palmer claims that "This is not merely a series of sexual metaphors, but an echo of the ancient songs and stories of metamorphosis, in which the pursued woman runs out of transformations and falls to the man." ==References==