Hares on the Mountain

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Hares on the Mountain is an English folk song (Roud 329) known under many titles, including Blackbirds and Thrushes, If All the Young Women, Nancy Lay Sleeping, The Knife in the Window and several others. Versions have been collected in England, Canada and the US, and today many folk artists have recorded it.

The song has two main parts, Hares on the Mountain and The Knife in the Window, which are sometimes found as two separate songs. It’s likely they started as two tunes that singers later blended. In the American tradition there is a third theme called Crawling and Creeping, where the singer imagines transforming young women (or men) into animals or plants and then describes how the opposite sex would respond.

In the lyrics, singers paint various transformations, such as maidens becoming blackbirds or hares on the mountain, or other creatures appearing in fields and reeds growing tall. A recurring, playful dialogue between two young lovers opens the story, showing the boy’s awkwardness and the girl’s initial caution, followed by willingness. A common refrain uses a light, nonsense chant like fol-de-rol-i-do and fol-de-rol-day.

Many versions include a risqué turn where the young man and woman untie or cut certain things, leading to a moment of sudden proximity. One famous line is “there’s a knife in the window.” Some versions end with them in bed together, while others rhyme out a louder image of passion, sometimes ending with a baby in the English or American variants.

There is also a more explicit variant often called Roll Your Leg Over, where the narrator dreams of creeping into the room, gets arrested, and the tale ends with a warning to avoid such behavior.

A tune for the song was published in 1902 by George Petrie as If All the Young Maidens were Blackbirds and Thrushes. The song’s exact history is murky, and no single original set of verses has survived in chapbooks or broadside ballads. The Roud Index records many versions: 27 in England (mostly the South and East Anglia, one from Yorkshire), 13 in the United States (many of the Crawling and Creeping type), and two in Canada.

Cecil Sharp collected many English variants, including a Somerset version published in Folk Songs From Somerset (1906). Recordings exist in the British Library Sound Archive and from various traditional singers, such as a Yorkshire version by Steve Gardham and Dorothy Bavey and a Somerset version by Bob Patten and Charlie Showers; other examples include Jeff Wesley from Northamptonshire and Harry List from Suffolk.

Since the 1960s, many revival artists have recorded the song, starting with Shirley Collins and Davey Graham in 1964, based on the Somerset tradition. Other modern performers include Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, All Them Witches, Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell, The Local Honeys, Lankum, Alt-J (for the Bright film soundtrack, 2017), Fern Maddie, Nora Brown and several others. Some artists recorded different versions that came from different sources, such as Steeleye Span, Frankie Armstrong and Chris Wood with Andy Cutting.

Scholars disagree about the song’s origins. Some say it is connected to or derived from older ballads like The Two Magicians (Child 44) or even Rory O’More, while others see it as a separate creation built from metamorphosis imagery. Many notes point out that linking magical transformations to the song is not certain, and the tune may have developed its own independent story and refrain over time.