This is a song that dates from at least 1500, but the version I grew up knowing was popularised during the mid-20th Century. There’s a lovely recording of it from 1946 by Burl Ives, and it became something of a standard during the 1960s folk revival. I first heard this on a record by the folk singer Julie Felix that my mum used to play when I was very young. It’s a song I strongly associate with my early childhood, and the nostalgia is heightened by the fact my mum died last year; but I also associate with being a dad as my daughters love it too. I’ve often played it for them on guitar and we sing it together.
It’s interesting to think about it as a short story, one that has been whittled down to its essentials over the centuries, because there’s a lot packed into its seven verses. There’s an atmospheric sense of place – it’s a cold, moonlit night and the fox has a long journey from his den to the farm. When he gets there, he declares that a couple of the birds in the farmer’s pen are going to “grease my chin” – an enjoyably archaic phrase meaning to gorge yourself on a meal so that it’s smeared around your mouth. (Think of the foxes eating in Wes Anderson’s film adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox – I’m sure he must know this song!)
There’s the savagery of the fox catching the duck and the goose, captured in a few brutal images: “He grabbed the grey goose by the neck, threw the duck across his back; he didn’t mind their quack, quack, quack, and their legs all a-dangling down-o.” There’s the comedy of ‘Old Mother Flipper-Flapper’, the farmer’s wife, who “jumped out of bed, and out of the window she poked her head” before alerting her husband. Then there’s a chase – the farmer sets off in hot pursuit but the fox (the ‘fals fox’ in the original Middle English, ‘fals’ meaning cunning or deceitful) manages to elude him and flee. There’s filial ingratitude – when he brings this fine meal back to his wife and cubs, “the little ones … say: ‘Daddy, daddy, go back again, for it must be a mighty fine town-o!’” And after that there’s a moral too. Rather than go running back again to satisfy his children, the fox and his wife tuck into the meal – “they’d never had such a supper in their life!” – while the little ones get to chew on the bones, presumably while reflecting on the consequences of their greed.
A Personal Anthology 