"Hares on the Mountain" (Roud 329) (otherwise titled "Blackbirds and Thrushes", "If All the Young Women", "Nancy Lay Sleeping", "The Knife in the Window", "Shepherd So Bold", "Sally My Dear", "Lightning and Thunder", "Crawling and Creeping" and "Ain't Gonna Do It No More") is an English folk song.
A third theme, "Crawling and Creeping", apparently an adaptation of the "Knife in the Window" motif, occurs in the American tradition.
This section starts as a dialogue between two young lovers, demonstrating his incompetence and her initial caution and subsequent willingness (if somewhat blunt at times): Now the door it is bolted, I cannot undo it x2[5] "Oh, now" she replied, "you must put your knee to it".
To me whack fol the diddle di do, to me whack fol the diddle daythough one version, collected in Virginia from Asa Martin and titled "Lightning and Thunder", ends with the birth of a baby: The knife it was got and the britches cut asunder [sung three times] And then they went at it like lightnin' and thunder.
[7] In this reworking of more risque versions of the song like "Roll Your Leg Over me" the narrator dreams that he "went a-crawling and a-creeping And I crawled in the room where my baby was sleeping".
The Local Honeys (Linda Jean Stokley and Montana Hobbs) recorded a live version at SomerSessions in Kentucky in 2016.
Some musicians recorded completely different versions of the song originating from different sources, including Steeleye Span,[21] Frankie Armstrong[22] and Chris Wood / Andy Cutting.
[25] Roy Palmer claims that "This is not merely a series of sexual metaphors, but an echo of the ancient songs and stories of metamorphosis, in which the pursued woman runs out of transformations and falls to the man.
"[5] However, Steve Roud and Julia Bishop argue that "To confuse the magical transformations in this ballad to the similes of our song, and to assume that one necessarily derives from the other, requires a giant leap of faith, backed by nothing more than the coincidence of hares, fishes, and so on.
"[2] In the sleeve notes to her CD "Till the Grass O'ergrew the Corn" (1997) Frankie Armstrong comments "It is widely accepted that this song is derived from the rare ballad "The Two Magicians" (Child #44), although the conceit is surely obvious enough to have been independently invented and all traces of magic (and story) have disappeared, leaving us with a genial day-dream of lyric.