Annotation:Rose is White and Rose is Red
X: 1 T:Rose is White, Rose is Red. (p)1651.PLFD.083 M:6/4 L:1/4 Q:3/4=100 S:Playford, Dancing Master,1st Ed.,1651. O:England H:1651. Z:Chris Partington. K:Gmix B2B B>AG|A2A c>BA|B2 B B>AG|B3 d2 e/f/| g>^fe d>cB|A2 A e>dc|B2 B B>AG|B3 d3:|
ROSE IS WHITE AND ROSE IS RED. English, Country Dance Tune (6/8 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. The melody was published with circle dance directions by John Playford in The English Dancing Master (1651) and was retained in the long-running series through the 8th edition of 1690, after which it was dropped from subsequent editions. The title phrase appears in Andrew Clark's manuscript and was printed in "Shirburn Ballads, LXX" (No. 10), 1907:
Rose is white and rose is red,
and rose is wondrous bonny,
And rose hath lost her mayden head
by playing with so manye.
Keith Whitlock points out that the country dance Playford printed was a round dance for as many as will. Circle dances, he says, had a symbolic value in conveying social harmony; he writes:
In fact the masquers in an earlier [Ben] Jonson work, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) were dressed in white and crimson, perhaps symbolizing the joining of virtue and pleasure, and representing [King] James’ policy on rural pastimes, published in Lancashire in 1617…known as The Book of Sports, and reissued again under [King] Charles in 1633[1]
Robert Burns submitted a song to the Scots Musical Museum called "Johnie Blunt" with a tune similar to Playford's.
- ↑ Keith Whitlock, “John Playford’s English Dancing Master 1650/51 as Cultural Politics”, Folk Music Journal, vol. 7, No. 5, 1999, p. 565.