> The Watersons > Songs > Stormy Winds

Stormy Winds / The Shepherds Song /
We Shepherds Are the Best of Men

[ Roud 284 ; Ballad Index RcWSATBM ; trad.]

Fred Jordan sang We Shepherds Are the Best of Men on his 1966 Topic album, Songs of a Shropshire Farm Worker. This track was also included in 2003 on his Veteran anthology A Shropshire Lad and on the Topic anthologies There Is a Man Upon the Farm (The Voice of the People Series, Volume 20, 1998) and Three Score and Ten (2009).

The Watersons sang Stormy Winds in 1981 on their album Green Fields. This track was reissued in 2003 on The Definitive Collection. A live version from a Christmas radio programme recorded in December 1980 at Crathorne Hall, Crathorne, North Yorkshire, was published in 2005 on the CD A Yorkshire Christmas. Another live performance by the Watersons (then with Rachel Waterson too) from the Bracknell Folk Festival in July 1987 was published in 2004 on the Watersons' 4CD anthology Mighty River of Song. A.L. Lloyd commented in the original album's sleeve notes:

Shepherds have had an up-and-down time throughout the ages. Once, when wool was England's main export they were privileged in the village community. Everyone looked up to them for advice and judgement. Later, when agriculture was the big thing, the shepherds sank in prestige (and in wages too!) and in some parts they were reckoned one stage up from tramps. Their songs are proud, tough, and this one's a good example, set to a stately variant of a melody that has carried scores of texts from the carol of Lazarus to (its bluntest form) The Star of the County Down. The composer Balfour Gardiner heard it from an old man approaching eighty, Benjamin Arnold, of Eaton, near Winchester. Only the tune attracted the composer, but later the words were recovered from the stationmaster at Cliddesden, near Basingstoke.

Maggie Holland sang this song as Shepherds in 2003 on her CD Circle of Light. She commented in her liner notes:

The Shepherd Song was collected from three different singers within a year or so of my mum's birth in February 1707, and within about 5 miles of her birthplace in Alresford, Hants. Although none of them mentioned Twyford Down by name, it's only a few miles away as well. I think I mostly learned the tune from Dave Parry, formerly of the Blades.

Lyrics

The Watersons sing Stormy Winds

Shepherds are the cleverest lads that ever trod England's ground,
They will call all at some alehouse and value not one crown,
They will call for liquor merrily and pay before they go,
They will work in the fields where stormy winds do blow.

A shepherd looked out all on a hill which made his heart to ache,
To see his sheep with their tongues out just ready for to bleat,
He looked up with courage bold and up the hill did go,
For to drive them to fold where stormy winds do blow.

As I walked over Mount Star plain the frost did cut my feet,
My ewes and lambs hung out their tongues and around me they did weep,
There I took up my courage bold and over the hills did go,
And I drove them to fold where stormy winds do blow.

So now that I have folded them and returned safe back again,
Into some jovial company I boldly entered in,
A-drinking of strong liquor boys it is my heart's delight,
While my sheep lay asleep all the cold and stormy night.

So come all you brisk young shepherds wherever you do march,
On a cold and a grimy morning did you ever feel the smart,
Did you ever feel the smart, my boys, through ilgo frost or snow,
As you drive them to fold where stormy winds do blow.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Greer Gilman for the transcription. Thanks too to Ken Hunt for explaining the Yorkshire dialect idiom “ilgo”for “either”.