A SOALIN' [Peter Paul & Mary cover] 

"Recorded by Jules Pellatt with Chris Benson using a Zoom Q2n, 23 December 2023. Chris (Aussie hat) is playing a Martin HD-35; I'm (red baseball cap) playing a Martin HD-28.
This is a very appropriate song to share two days before Christmas!
This song is a traditional English folk tune, sung by groups of children at the front doors of rural homes in the shires. The guitar parts are relentless from the opening note and any mistakes require an immediate retake! Very difficult to deliver in one go!
------------------0------------------
"It is a challenge to decide whether this song - A’ Soalin’ - is a Christmas Song or a song for All Soul’s Night (or Hallow’s Eve).
The chorus suggests All Souls - a soul cake is cake for the dead - and in England, given to children (or the poor) as they went, on November 1, from door to door singing prayers for the dead. That is they went a souling (an earlier version of “trick or treating”).
Soul cake, soul cake, please good missus a soul cake
Apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry
Any good thing to make us all in merry
But the plum, the cherry and make us all merry sure give it a Christmas flavour. Maybe the mistress of the house would have a store of these fruits in preparation for the imminent Yuletide feast - and the plea was to spare some.
It seems probable that the original version (first published in 1891) of this song was for All Soul’s.
In the early 1960s, Noel Paul Stookey (Paul from Peter, Paul & Mary) with Elena Mezzetti, and Tracy Batteast wrote an adaptation and new arrangement that included very strong Christmas references - using God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen as a counter-melody and lyric.
This adaptation first appeared on Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1963 album Moving."
[Source: xmastracks.wor...]