Wanton Seed, The

DESCRIPTION: Singer meets a pretty maid who wants "the chiefest grain"; she accepts his services, asking him to sow her meadow with "the wanton seed." After forty weeks she returns with a slender waist (presumably having borne a child), wanting more of the wanton seed
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1813 (broadside, Bodleian Firth b.34(307))
KEYWORDS: sex pregnancy farming magic
FOUND IN: Britain(England(South))
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Reeves-TheEverlastingCircle 137, "The Wanton Seed" (1 text)
DT, WNTNSEED*
ADDITIONAL: Jon Raven, _The Urban and Industrial Songs of the Black Country and Birmingham_, Broadside, 1977, pp. 96-97, "The Wanton Seed" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Roy Palmer, "'Birmingham Broadsides and Oral Tradition" -- essay found in David Atkinson and Steve Roud, Editors, _Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Tradition_, Ashgate, 2014, p. 42, "The Wanton Seed" (1 text)
Roud #17230
RECORDINGS:
A. L. Lloyd, "The Wanton Seed" (on BirdBush1, BirdBush2)
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Firth b.34(307)[some words illegible], "The Wanton Seed" ("As I walk'd forth one morning fair"), J. Evans (London), 1780-1812
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Seeds of Love" (theme)
cf. "The Next Market Day" (plot) and references there
cf. "The Mower"
ALTERNATE TITLES:
The Chiefest Grain
NOTES [40 words]: Again, I've refrained from calling this "bawdy," preferring "erotic." And I've keyworded it as "magic" because of the clear connection the song makes between the fertility of grain and sexuality, a common folk strain of sympathetic magic. - PJS
Last updated in version 5.2
File: DTwntnse

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