Wedding in Renews, The

DESCRIPTION: "There's going to be a happy time, I want you all to know, There's me and Joe and Uncle Snow Invited for to go" to the Wedding in Renews. The girls have goose grease in their hair, the men have "whiskers to their shoes." They will have a happy dance
AUTHOR: Johnny Burke (1851-1930)
EARLIEST DATE: 1929 (Burke's Popular Songs)
KEYWORDS: wedding humorous dancing
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REFERENCES (4 citations):
ADDITIONAL: Johnny Burke, _Burke's Popular Songs_, self-published, 1929 (a PDF is available on the Memorial University of Newfoundland web site), p.[7], "The Wedding in Renews" (1 text)
Johnny Burke (John White, Editor), _Burke's Ballads_, no printer listed, n.d. (PDF available on Memorial University of Newfoundland web site), p. 19, "The Wedding in Renews" (1 text)
Johnny Burke, _Burke's Christmas Songster 1926_, self-published, 1926 (PDF copy avallable on the Memorial University of Newfoundland web site), [no page number], "The Wedding In Renews" (1 text)
Johnny Burke (William J. Kirwin, editor), _John White's Collection of Johnny Burke Songs_, Harry Cuff Publications, St. John's, 1981, #18, pp. 32-33, "The Renews Wedding" (1 text)
Roud #12519
NOTES [230 words]: Another of Johnny Burke's crazy-party songs, along the lines of "The Kelligrew's Soiree." For a brief biography of Burke, see the notes to "The Kelligrew's Soiree."
Philip Hiscock's notes to this song in Eric West, Sing Around This One: Songs of Newfoundland & Labrador Vol. 2, Vinland Music, 1997, p. 56, suggests that this began as a skit in one of Burke's "entertainments."
Nonetheless it is true that Newfoundland weddings were notable for their extravagance (insofar as its poor economy allowed); according to Kevin Major, As Near to Heaven by Sea: A History of Newfoundland & Labrador, 2001 (I use the 2002 Penguin Canada edition), "A wedding turned into revelry for the whole community, a grad reason to take the mind from whatever hardship lay ahead. Any outport wedding had at its center, not the blushing couple, but as great a store of food and drink as the parents could afford or the luck of the hunt would provide. The tables at one wedding feast in northern Newfoundland, recounted by an astonished visitor in the late 1800s, held 'twenty-seven enormous puddings, seven beavers, several hares and ptarmigan, a corresponding supply of vegetables, some rum... and cake ad infinitum.' And every man, woman, and child in the place showed up, invited or not."
Major adds that, because most of the houses were small, "The guests were usually served in shifts." - RBW
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File: JBPS007

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