Yard-O 'Yaddo (Bella in the Yard) (Bellaring ina Yaddo)

DESCRIPTION: Trinidadian patois. Chorus: "Wey, Bella in de yard-o, rad-o, rad-o, Bella in de yard-o eee." Nonsense verses: "Monkey play de fiddle And the baboon play de banjo." "Want to see de monkey dance Bust a pepper in he tail"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1907 (Jekyll-JamaicanSongAndStory)
KEYWORDS: fiddle dancing nonballad worksong animal
FOUND IN: West Indies(Jamaica,Trinidad) Belize
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Jekyll-JamaicanSongAndStory 57, ("Bell, oh, Bell oh, Bell a ring a yard oh!") (1 text) (1 tune)
Abrahams-DeepTheWaterShallowTheShore, pp. 84-86, "Yard Away, Yard Away" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: Ervin Beck, "Belizean Creole Folk Songs" in Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 29, No. 1 (March 1983 (made available online by JSTOR)), pp. 45-46, "Run Johnny run, boy, vaulkin [?] on your block today" (1 text, 1 tune) (recorded 1956-57))
Olive Lewin, Forty Folk Songs of Jamaica (Washington: General Secretariat of the Organization of American States, 1973), pp. 39-40, "Bell a Ring a Yard" (1 text, 1 tune)
Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits, _Trinidad Village_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 283, ("Yard-o, yard-o") (1 text)
RECORDINGS:
Emil Paul, Carl Monsegui and Allan Lovelace, "Yard-O 'Yaddo" (on WITrinidadVillage01)
NOTES [147 words]: The description is based on WITrinidadVillage01. Jekyll-JamaicanSongAndStory's patois is Jamaican.
Jekyll's text has "Baboon roll de drum oh, Monkey rub de fiddle, oh."
Beck's text: "Run, Johnny, run, boy, caulkin[?] on your block today / Hey, yey! Bur-ah-yin da yagga [?]. Monkey play de fiddle and the baboon dance the tune. Hey, yey! Bur-ah-yin da yagga."
Beck has this as a call-and-response loggers' work song. The liner notes for Herskovits say "versions of this song are known from Jamaica, ..., Carriacou ... [and] Tobago" (Donald R. Hill, Maureeen Warner-Lewis, John Cowley, Lise Winer, liner notes on WITrinidadVillage01).
Herskovits and Herskovits, pp. 282-283: "The fisherman's song [includes] words ... taken from a folk-tale, and to these are added the comment about Bella who is in the yard, with the implication that the work she does may not have social approval." - BS
Last updated in version 6.7
File: RcYOYBiY

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