Maple Sweet Vermont
Maple Sweet
Maeve Fairfax - Photo courtesy of Mark Sustic
Each year here at the Vermont Folklife Center we like to mark sugaring time by asking a local musician to record themselves singing a version of the Vermont folk song, Maple Sweet (also known as the Vermont Sugar-Maker's Song) that we can share. This year we are lucky to have Maeve Fairfax participating in our Vermont Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program and she just happens to be studying traditional song with Vermont folk music legend Pete Sutherland. As folk singers do, Pete passed the song on to Maeve and she was kind enough to share a recording of her rendition with us.
Maeve is doing her apprenticeship with Pete as part of a VFC partnership with Young Tradition Vermont (YTV), an organization that supports young people learning traditional music and dance. She was named the 2020/2021 artist for YTV’s second annual Youth Commission, a project through which a young musician is charged with creating a small ensemble and a program of original compositions and arrangements with support from mentors/master artists of their choosing. Maeve’s work as a musician was recently featured in an article for Kid’s Vermont. Thanks so much for sharing this “Sweet” song with us Maeve!
About the Song
The Reverend Perrin B. Fiske (born 1834 in Waitsfield, VT) composed the Vermont Sugar Maker's Song - also known as Maple Sweet - in 1858, and it has long been a staple in the Vermont folk song repertoire.
Documented both by Helen Flanders and George Brown in Vermont Folk-Songs & Ballads (1932) and Eloise Hubbard Linscott in Folk Songs of Old New England (1939), Margaret MacArthur recorded a version of it on her 1982 album, An Almanac of New England Farm Songs.
Lyrics
Transcribed lyrics from the version performed by Maeve:
Maple Sweet
When you see the vapor pillars link the forest and the sky,
You will know the days of sugar making then are drawing nigh;
Frosty nights and thawy days make those maple pulses play,
Till congested with their sweetness, they delight to bleed away
Oh! Bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble goes the pan,
Furnish better music for the season if you can,
See the golden billows, watch their ebb and flow.
Sweeter joys indeed, we sugar makers know.
When you see the farmer trudging with her dripping buckets home,
You will know the days of sugar making then have finally come.
As the fragrant odors pour through your open kitchen door,
How the eager children rally, ever loudly crying: "More?"
Do you say you don't believe it? Take a saucer and a spoon,
Though you're sourer than a lemon, you'll be sweeter very soon.
And the greenest leaves you see, on each spreading maple tree,
Let ‘em sip and sip all summer, they’ll be autumn beauties be.
Then for home, or love, or any kind of sickness, it’s the thing.
Take in allopathic doses and repeat it every spring.
Until everyone you meet, if at home or on the street,
Will have half a mind to bite you, you will look so very sweet.
And don't forget to check out these other renditions of our favorite springtime song:
Pete Sutherland - Maple Sweet 2020
Tony Barrand and Amanda Witman - Maple Sweet 2019
Deb Flanders - Maple Sweet 2018
Dan and Megan MacArthur - Maple Sweet 2017
References
Cohen, Norman (ed.). 2008. American Folk Songs: A Regional Encyclopedia.
Flanders, Helen Hartness and George Brown. 1932. Vermont Folk-Songs & Ballads.
Linscott, Eloise Hubbard. 1939. Folk Songs of Old New England.
MacArthur, Margaret. 1982. An Almanac of New England Farm Songs.
MacArthur, Margaret and Gregory Sharrow. 1994. The Vermont Heritage Songbook.
Always helpful online folk song resources
Keefer, Jane. 2013. Folk Music Index. Last accessed 2018-03-08.
Waltz, Robert B. and David G. Engle. 2016. Traditional Ballad Index. Last accessed 2018-03-08.
Mudcat Cafe/Digital Tradition Folk Song Database. Last accessed 2018-03-08.