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Mother Mary Brown
Spoof entry from the spoof article "The New Grove," listing entries that would NOT appear in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, from The Musical Times (Vol. 122, No. 1658, April 1981). Mother Brown is the subject of a bawdy song "Knees Up Mother Brown" that dates back at least as far as WWI.
Brown, 'Mother' (Mary) (b 1550; d Wapping, 3 Jan 1611). English virginalist. Her reputation as a performer is questionable, and she would now be forgotten but for A. R. Lowse's identification of her as Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Lowse bases this on his reading of Simon Forman's assertion that 'she was verie browne of haire' (previously read as 'she was Marie Browne a hore') and Aubrey's tale that she pursued Beaumont and Fletcher out of the Globe Tavern shouting 'Ile get my handes on you, you sausie Iackes', a striking parallel with Sonnet 128. Brown's virginal playing ended abruptly in 1583 when Alfonso Ferrabosco (i) suggested that she should try out his organ. She 'coniured noble musicke' from it, though others found its touch 'verie spongie and slow to act' and had difficulty in 'getting ye breeze up'. In later years she turned to dancing, and it was for her that Ferrabosco wrote his best-known volta, Ginocchi in alto, Maria Bruno (see VOLTA (i) [the relevant passage reads 'she will rise with surprising ease to a remarkable altitude']). A debased version of the dance is still popular in the district where she died.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BurneyH; HawkinsH'
J. Sutton: An Account of Short Organs (London, 1842)
J. Aubrey: Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark (Oxford, 1898)
S.W. Harvey: 'A Mother Brown Organ and some Others', The Organ, iv (1924), 250
A. R. Lowse: 'Why I am always right about Shakespeare', Daily Mirror (25 Aug 1969), 5
H. von Leberwurst: 'Einige Bermerkungen zu dem Ursprung der Wappinger Volksmelodie "Knees up, Mother Brown"', Studien in Ostlondoner Musikwissenschaft, xciv (1972), 3912
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