Home » The fox went out on a chilly night…

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<i>The fox went out on a chilly night…</i> — 22 Comments

  1. Impressive. Makes me wonder how long it took for humans to cross over the Bering Straits. The Mongol armies traveled rapidly over long distances, but they had horses, rode with several mounts, carried food, and knew where they were going.

  2. My first memory of the song is from Odetta. Odetta sings The Fox. I recall a family friend, visiting from out of state, informing me that HER Daddy didn’t sing the song that way. Oh well..
    On the other hand, one’s father singing the song to you does indicate that yes, this is a folk song. One Christmas, I requested Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America. My mother penciled in some nice additions about songs that her father sang to her.

    When you take your dog out for a walk, remember this story about the fox that walked 3,500 km. Your dog just loves going out on a walk. This is what hunters do.

    That fox, judging by the distances she covered, was able to find sufficient food on her trip. Before electronic tracking devices, we wouldn’t have known this.

    If one is surprised that horses escaped from Spanish Mexico populated the Great Plains up to Canada, this story about fox mobility might lessen the surprise.

  3. Fox went out one stormy night…I learned it from my college roommate 60 yrs ago.
    It is a notable song, with charming lyrics, many verses… We sang it in the dorm. The innocence of those days! Did other things also, like going for after-dinner walks and admiring the local PA architecture. Today everyone would think we were two queers.
    We two still see each other; he is a yankee and I’m not. Brought him to southern MS 5 yrs ago, since he’d never been in the state, and he was startled at how fine the landscape was.

    …there were the little ones, eight, nine, ten…
    …sayin’ daddy, daddy can you go back again, ’cause it must be a mighty fine town-o, town-o, town-o….

    Wiki says its been around for some six (!) centuries: “The earliest version of the song was a Middle English poem, dating from the 15th century, found in the British Museum.”

  4. Thanks from me too. Burl Ives had such a distinctive voice. I know that very few people know who is singing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” at Christmas. Of course it is a banned song now, being about bulling and racist.

    And of course “Goober Peas” a song from the Civil War I guess is banned because there were slaves in the US then.

  5. J. R. R. Tolkien set one of his own poems to this tune. There are several versions; the one most people know is “The Stone Troll” which appears in “The Fellowship of the Ring” (first volume of LOTR). It is sung by the hobbit, Sam Gamgee, who is also said to be the author. I think there is also a recording of Tolkien singing this.

  6. By the way, thank you for linking to that Burl Ives recording. I enjoyed listening to that.

  7. LYNN,

    Don’t forget Burl Ives’ ‘A Little Bitty Tear’. Always liked that song when I was a kid.

  8. I first heard it on an album by The brothers Four, c.1958. Folk music was generally popular, even for city dwellers. Brothers Four, Kingston Trio, Belafonte, and more.

    My mother loved Burl Ives.

  9. Really interesting funny why the fox kept going West for food, the article doesn’t talk about it. Does mention the shrinking polar ice — I’m wondering what the news will be saying if next year a little ice age starts (due to a lack of solar sunspots).

    I recall the Burl Ives song: Ain’t we crazy?
    My mother liked him and all the mentioned folk songs, plus the folk rock groups like Mamas and Pappas and Lovin’ Spoonful. Singing together in the car was a fun family thing. Our family does that less often, now, but not never. (Maybe I should try to do it more often.)

    Folk music is usually fun to sing along with. Many Slovaks remember the commie songs they learned when young, and often sing some of them later in the campfire nights after more drinking. Burl Ives would approve.

    (Looks like the almost unique 5 min to edit is back! Hurray!)

  10. John F. MacMichael on July 6, 2019 at 7:39 pm said:
    J. R. R. Tolkien set one of his own poems to this tune. There are several versions; the one most people know is “The Stone Troll” which appears in “The Fellowship of the Ring” (first volume of LOTR). It is sung by the hobbit, Sam Gamgee, who is also said to be the author. I think there is also a recording of Tolkien singing this.
    * * *
    I didn’t know this about JRRT (would love to hear the recording), but when I first read the books, I noticed how naturally that poem fell into the tune, and sang it that way in college.

    While I love Ives, I think I like Belafonte’s version better — as for singing along with folk songs, which our generation did as a matter of course, my recording of Lehrer’s ode IIRC has a bit of his patter that isn’t shown below, which is, “They call them folk songs because folk sing them.”

    Lynn: even in the seventies, there were people protesting the Offense Brigades; unfortunately, they lost the battle — It doesn’t matter if you have all the good songs when the popular culture gatekeepers drown you out.
    See the cross-posted comment here.
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/07/06/americans-are-not-especially-fond-of-the-woke/#comment-2441636

    The Folk Song Army by Tom Lehrer

    One type of song that has come into increasing prominence in
    recent months is the folk song of protest. You have to admire
    people who sing these songs. It takes a certain amount of courage
    to get up in a coffee house or a college auditorium and come out
    in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against,
    like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.
    But the nicest
    thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel so good.

    I have a song here which, I realize, should be accompanied on
    a folk instrument, in which category the piano does not, alas, qualify.
    So imagine, if you will, that I am playing an 88-string guitar!

    We are the folk song army,
    Every one of us cares.
    We all hate poverty, war, and injustice
    Unlike the rest of you squares.

    There are innocuous folk songs, yeah,
    But we regard ’em with scorn.
    The folks who sing ’em have no social conscience,
    Why, they don’t even care if Jimmy Crack Corn.

    If you feel dissatisfaction,
    Strum your frustrations away.
    Some people may prefer action,
    But give me a folk song any old day.

    The tune don’t have to be clever,
    And it don’t matter if you put a couple extra syllables into a line.
    It sounds more ethnic if it ain’t good English
    And it don’t even gotta rhyme… excuse me: rhyne!

    Remember the war against Franco?
    That’s the kind where each of us belongs.
    Though he may have won all the battles,
    We had all the good songs!

    So join in the folk song army!
    Guitars are the weapons we bring
    To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice.
    Ready, aim, sing!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tDZ5lriIIc

  11. Thanks, Aesop! Smart fella, that Lehra! (“Don’t even gotta rhyme.”) 😆

  12. Julie – if Aesop doesn’t have a fable about something, Lehrer probably has a song!

  13. Yep! (But we gotta get PETA after him about his attitude on pigeons in the park. Come to think of it, Ms. Stein expressed a certain sadness about that. But no practical experience in dealing with the problem.) 😀

  14. These polar foxes can move amazingly fast, as I witnessed during my hiking in Polar Urals in winter. Their main diet are mice, whom they can smell and dig out from under snow, but they also can hunt polar partridges as well (the birds the size of pigeons).

  15. Chuck — After I saw the movie “Mongol,” I came to the conclusion that the story that all the horses in North America are descended from a couple of escaped Spanish horses, and that the Plains Amerindians developed their horse culture in 200 years could not be right. Suppose the two horses were both males, both females, or one gelding in the pair. It took thousands of years for other tribes to domesticate various animals. I think it’s much more likely that some of the Siberians crossed the land bridge on horseback and brought horses and horse culture with them.

  16. Richard, if I remember right I was taught the fossil record showed the progenitors of the horse were native to North America and migrated to Asia. Those ancestors died out in NA.

    On the other hand, I tend to think the early human migrants to NA came coasting in canoes or other small boats. Indeed, eventually all the way to Tierra del Fuego is my conjecture.

  17. To AesopFan above @July 7, 2019 at 7:40PM:

    Since you said you would love to hear the recording of Tolkien singing his poem “The Stone Troll” to this tune and I just found a current source for it: “The J. R. R. Tolkien Audio Collection” a 4 CD set available from Amazon for about $25. This has Tolkien reading and singing selections from”The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” (and his son Christopher reading from “The Silmarillion”). One of the Amazon reviewers very helpfully lists all the tracks in the set.

    I hope you see this note (or perhaps our gracious hostess will point it out to you).

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