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trad 

Steve Gardham estimated the song was from circa 1800. The Bodleian Broadside Ballad Collection lists it in six books from the 19th century; the dating of these indicates it is at least as old as 1840. The various commentary from recording artists on Mainly Norfolk suggests that it was quite popular in the early 20th century and its verses likely evolved a lot during that period.

It was pleasant and delightful one midsummer’s morn
When the fields and the meadows we all covered with corn
And the blackbirds and thrushes sang on every green spray
And the larks, they sang melodious at the dawning of the day

A sailor and his true love went walking one day
Said the sailor to his true love, I am bound far away
I am bound for the East Indies, where the loud cannons roar
I must go & leave my Nancy, she’s the girl that I adore.

Then the ring from off her finger she instantly drew
Saying take this, my dearest William and my heart will go too
And whilst he stood embracing her, tears from her eyes fell
Saying may I go along with you, oh no my love, farewell. 

Leon Rosselson 1972

Written for E. D. Berman's successful Save Piccadilly campaign which also employed street theater to fight high-rise development proposals to make the "heart of London" more respectable. "I don't remember the details but in essence it meant putting people underground to make room for more traffic. The plan was shelved and Piccadilly and Eros, in all their seediness, remain as a disreputable meeting place for lonely souls and lost tourists. The Save Piccadilly campaign asked me to write a 'protest' song. I wrote two. This one with its banner-waving singalong refrain, 'That's not the way it's got to be' and "The Man Who Puffs The Big Cigar'."

Piccadilly’s just a slum where the slugs and weirdies come
Knock it down and clean it up and watch the towers rise
Make it look respectable, everything identical
Trees will be permitted of the regulation size

But where have all the people gone?
The concrete towers in spring look sad.
Why does the wind blow hard as stone?
Why is this place so cold and drab?

Chorus:
That’s not the way it’s got to be, people before property
We want a meeting place and not a traffic jam
Let Eros speak for all of us, London’s streets belong to us
No to their profits and their Piccadilly plan

Concrete is very neat, keep the people off the streets
Shove them down in tunnels where they won’t get in the way
Hotels and offices, valuable properties
What a lot of money we’ll be making every day

But where have all the people gone?
The concrete towers in spring look sad.
Why does the wind blow hard as stone?
Why is this place so cold and drab?

Road space is what we need, give the traffic room to breathe
More cars are expected so provisions must be made
What to do with Eros, Piccadilly’s glamour boy?
Corner him and pen him in and teach him to behave.

But where have all the people gone?
The concrete towers in spring look sad.
Why does the wind blow hard as stone?
Why is this place so cold and drab? 

Jess Arrowsmith 2008

Melrose Quartet: https://melrosequartet.bandcamp.com/track/pilgrimage

Where are they going, your sons and daughters,
where are they going with games and fun?
Where are they going, your sons and daughters,
where are they going with games and fun?

Chorus:
Under the moon, over and done,
Under the moon and the rising sun
We cannot go back, so says everyone.

They’re going for soldiers, sons and daughters,
Going to fight and carry a gun

Why are they going, your sons and daughters,
Why are they going with fife and drum?

They’re off to the fighting, sons and daughters,
Fighting a war that cannot be won

Will they come back, your sons and daughters,
Will they come back while they’re still young?

Only a few of them, sons and daughters,
Passage of death will wait for none

Colin Cater 2000

Cater writes on Mudcat: “Idea derives from who knows when – I got it from Ratlebone and Ploughjack?Song took several years to develop – chorus came first then the verses a couple of years later.”

Chorus:
Only once a year, Penny for the Ploughboy
To keep us in good cheer and multiply the grain
Only once a year, Penny for the Ploughboy
Speed the plough until the year turns round again

At the end of the year all the fields were brown in the days when I was young
With corn in the barns, frost in the ground and never a green shoot sprung
Then the ploughmen came with hobnailed boots and the Molly dance rich and slow
And with magical plays and songs of the land they bade the corn to grow

Then they ploughed and sowed and harrowed him in and the rain from heaven did fall
The wind did blow and the sun did shine and he soon grew amazing tall
When the corn was ripened the harvesters came and the barns and the breweries rang
And when all was safely gathered in they raised their voice and sang.

But now the seasons are all changed round, a slave to the great machines.
The fields are ploughed in the high summer time, by the turn of the year they’re green
Gone are the trades, the horses, the families that followed the seasons along
And the old pubs close because they can’t resound to the fiddle or a country song

But there’s strength in the plays, the dances and songs that have lasted a thousand years
There’s strength in barley malt and hops brewed into a country beer
It puts a spring in the step of an old straw bear, makes the dancer leap for the skies
And when the Molly gangs come to speed the plough they’ll raise their glass and cry. 

John Prine 1971

About coal strip mining in Appalachia. The town of Paradise, KY was demolished in 1967 so TVA's coal plant could expand. In 2020 it was converted to a natural gas plant.

When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn

Chorus:
And Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County?
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away

Well, sometimes we’d travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes we’d shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill

Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man

When I die, let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester Dam
I’ll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin’
Just five miles away from wherever I am 

Hedy West 1976

To the tune of "Palms of Victory"

Magpie Arc: https://themagpiearc.bandcamp.com/track/pans-of-biscuits

I saw an honest farmer His back was bending low
Working in those cotton fields as hard as he could go
He piled it in the railpen Until the merchant came
That he might attach his cotton That he should pay his claim

Chorus (x2):
It’s pans of biscuits, Bowls of gravy, Pans of biscuits We shall have

I saw him in the evening His back was against the tree
His poor old head was aching He lowered down on his knee
“I’ll be compelled to leave here Or surely I will die!
My head’s commenced aching” I heard the farmer cry

“I’ve toiled all my lifetime And still I find I’m poor
Without an education My children’s left my door”
I saw an honest farmer His back was bending low
Working in those cotton fields as hard as he could go

trad 

Recorded by the Wilson Family in 1991 as "Beggar's Carol".

May good luck attend this house and happiness and laughter
Love to master and to maid, and all that follow after.

Chorus:
Let every pan that you have got, Be full of pancakes piping hot,
Pancakes hot! Pancakes hot! Pancakes hot!
We like pancakes from the pot!

Mistress give to us we beg, of all the cakes you cannot eat
We will lick your dishes clean, for cakes to us are more than meat.

We will play upon the drum, a merry tune we heard in France
If you will but give us cakes, to warm our legs so we may dance. 

Jim Page 2003

Christy Moore changed a lot of the lyrics with Page's blessing for his 2024 recording; this is Moore's version with a chorus Page recorded in 2024 that differs from his original 2003 chorus.

Let me tell you a story, I’ll be quick as I can
Terrible news from the Holy Land
Pictures of Children etched in my mind
Buried in the rubble on the firing line
The Jews and The Arabs lived one and the same
A thousand years then the Zionists came
Came like a river, came like a flood
Al Nakba was written on the wall in blood

Chorus:
O Palestine, going home sometime

Talk about settlers from far away
Talk about dollars from the USA
Talk about blast bombs, the bullets and the lead
The shadow of the Jackboot hanging over your head
What can you do when they demolish your home
Olive Trees buried and gone
Do you dare to resist?
Stand on the road with a rock in your fist

They talk about peace like it’s a moral obligation
There’ll never be peace under occupation
Talk about Talks, to the beat of the drum
70 years Nakba rolls on
We need to talk about the friends that we endorse
The rockets and the tanks and the warships they disperse
No wonder it seems to be
An undemocratic version of Democracy

Leon Rosselson 1966

Written following the Aberfan disaster of 1966 outside Cardiff where a coal mine waste tip collapsed and avalanched slurry into town, killing 109 children at Pantglas Junior School and 35 others. Rosselson wrote "I like playing fantasy games inventing the newspaper headlines I'd most like to see. 'Lord Robens Buried by Slag Heap' would be rather pleasing." Robens was chairman of the National Coal Board in 1966 and showed a degree of indifference to the disaster. He proceeded to tell lies about it to the press before raiding the public disaster funds to cover the Coal Board's own clean-up costs.

Martin Simpson & the Wilson Family: https://towerseyfestival.bandcamp.com/track/palaces-of-gold

If the sons of company directors
And judges’ private daughters
Had to go to school in a slum school
Dumped by some joker in a damp back alley
Had to herd into classrooms cramped with worry
With a view onto slag heaps and stagnant pools
Had to file through corridors greyed with age
And play in a crackpot concrete cage

Chorus:
Buttons would be pressed
Rules would be broken
Strings would be pulled
And magic words spoken
Invisible fingers would mould
Palaces of gold

If prime ministers and advertising executives
Royal personages and bank managers’ wives
Had to live out their lives in dank rooms
Blinded by smoke and the foul air of sewers
Rot on the walls and rats in the cellars
In rows of dumb houses like mouldering tombs
Had to bring up their children and watch them grow
In a wasteland of dead streets where nothing will grow

I’m not suggesting any sort of a plot
Everyone knows there’s not
But you unborn millions might like to be warned
That if you don’t want to be buried alive by slag heaps
Pitfalls and damp walls and rat traps and dead streets
Arrange to be democratically born
The son of a company director
Or a judge’s fine and private daughter 

Lotus Dickey 

Becky & Nicole: https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/pair-in-a-paradise

Heaven and Earth by the Lord were created,
Sun and the moon and the stars so elated,
Two in a garden, a beautifully mated
Pair in a Paradise, bare there were they.

Chorus:
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, (x3)
Pair in a Paradise, bare there were they.

Fruit-bearing trees in that garden were planted,
Nothing was lacking, no nothing was scanted;
Perfect for two, a completely enchanted
Pair in a paradise, bare there were they.

Of all the fruit growing there they’d partaken
Saving for one that the Lord had forbade them
Lest they be a-dying, that man and maiden,
Pair in a paradise, bare there were they.

Then in the garden there spoke an advisor:
“Why doth thou listen to all of these lies for?
Eat,” said the serpent, “to be but the wiser.”
Pair in a paradise, bare there were they.

Satan the serpent was oh so deceiving.
Eve though his cunning was led to believing;
Ate, as did Adam, soon to be a-grieving,
Pair in a paradise, bare there were they.

Hiding in shame at a growing awareness
There of their nakedness, there of their bareness,
Clothed by the Lord, then, a sadly embarrassed
Pair in a paradise, bare there were they.

Satan in Eden then had his beginning,
Sought with the lie o’er the Lord to be winning,
Death brought instead to the world through a sinning
Pair in a paradise, bare there were they.