Nineteenth-century painting by Alexander George Fraser illustrating the ballad Get Up and Bar the Door
17 July 2023
(Updated 20–21 July: identified Kate in the Old Smithy poem as a servant rather than the mistress of the house; elaborated on the Kate Barlass legend)
Katy (or Katie) bar the door is an American catchphrase used to warn of impending danger. The bar the door part is self-explanatory, referring to locking a door against intruders. But who is Katy? There’s no satisfactory answer to that question, but the phrase is connected with traditional folk music on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bar the door is an unremarkable phrase, with collocations appearing many times over the centuries. In the nineteenth century it became a standard catchphrase that called for some kind of barrier to entry, either literal or metaphorical. But it also appears in a couple of ballads published in 1769 that seem to have engendered the catchphrase. The first one is titled The Jolly Beggar, about a beggar who beds a woman who offers him hospitality:
The beggar’s bed was made e’en wi’ good clean straw and hay,
And in ahint the ha’ door, and there the beggar lay.
Up raise the goodman’s dochter, and for to bar the door,
And there she saw the beggar standin i’ the floor.
He took the lassie in his arms, and to the bed he ran,
O hooly! Hooly wi’ me, Sir, ye’ll waken our goodman.
The second is actually titled Get Up and Bar the Door. It is about a husband and wife arguing over who should get up and lock the door. They decide that the first one who speaks will do it. While they are sitting in silence, two men enter and plunder the house, but the couple remain silent until the intruders threaten to kiss the wife, at which point the husband stands up and speaks out, and the wife cackles that he has lost the bet. The ballad ends with these lines:
Then up and started our goodwife,
Gied three skips on the floor;
“Goodman, you’ve spoken the foremost word,
Get up and bar the door.”
Robert Burns also used bar the door in his bawdy Reels o’ Bogie, which was also set to music. (“Bogie” here refers to the River Bogie in Aberdeenshire.) The poem is of uncertain date but must predate his 1796 death. While the song has been played quite a bit over the centuries, its subject (and its inclusion of one particular word) prevented the publication of the one particular stanza until the 1964 American edition of the collection Merry Muses of Caledonia. As a result of the censorship, we don’t know for certain exactly how Burns’s original read. The version of the final stanza, with the offending word partially redacted, as it was published in 1964 reads:
Said I, young man, more you can’t do,
I think I’ve granted your desire,
By bobbing on my wanton clue,
You see your pintle’s all on fire.
When on my back I work like steel
An bar the door wi my left heel,
The mair you f[uck] the less I feel,
An that’s the reels o’ Bogie.
Bar the door’s use in American folk music dates to at least 1850, when it appears in A Christmas Song: A Song of a Pleasant Old Woodman, and his Wife Joan, at a Christmas Fire by an F. J. Palmer, published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle of New Lisbon, Ohio on 23 November. The song is about an older couple who lock the door so their grandchildren will not disturb their amorous activities. The song opens:
Come! Jock o’ the wood, my jolly old man! get up and bar the door!
The feathery sleet with frosty foot, is dancing on the moor.
But while we’ve seen bar the door in various folk songs on both sides of the Atlantic, so far there is no Katy. The first known association of a woman of that name barring the door in the phrase is from an 1841 poem The Old Smithy, published in a London collection of sketches and stories titled The Mirror. The story is about a blacksmith who kills a lone traveler for his money on dark, November night. Years later, a dog digs up the traveler’s bones, and the blacksmith hangs himself and his wife dies of grief. The poem opens:
“The snow is drifting on the ground,
And loud the east wind roars;
Come, men and maidens, hie you in;
Kate, bar those creaking doors.“Call in the dogs, rouse up the fire;
And, mistress, do you hear?
Heat us a jug of elder wine,
For the night is chill and drear.”
The Kate here appears to be a servant in a public house or inn where the speaker is telling his grim tale. It’s worth noting that this is a British source, while the subsequent early sources are all American. How it might be connected to these later American uses is not known.
Katy makes her American appearance in a nineteenth-century American fiddle tune entitled, appropriately enough, Katie, Bar the Door. We don’t know who wrote the song or when it was written, but the earliest known reference to it is from the 2 October 1872 Louisiana Democrat of Alexandra, LA:
The Custom House Packet, with the Custom House colored band, U.S. Marshal Packard, in command, with the old flag triumphantly kissing the breeze of old Red, the band playing “Katie, Bar The Door,” and with waving rags touched the wharf and proceeded to land her precious cargo.
So, a song of that title existed in 1872, but efforts to track down its music or lyrics have been unsuccessful. The following lyrics are associated with a tune called Katy Bar the Door as played by twentieth-century banjo man Roscoe Parrish. But we don’t know if this particular tune, much less its lyrics, is the one from the 1870s:
Katy bar your door,
Katy bar your door;
The Indians jumping all around your house,
Katy bar your door.
Katie bar the door appears in 1878 in yet another song. This one was composed especially for a wedding of a soldier named Murphy, stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and a Miss Cooper. It was published in Missouri’s Sedalia Weekly Bazoo on 26 March 1878, and includes the lines:
This winsome maid had lovers many,
Whose love she did implore,
There was George and Fred and Harry,
And Ed who numbered with the score,
But when the soldier he came in,
It was “Katie bar the door.”
We don’t know the first name of Miss Cooper, but it probably wasn’t Katie. The quotation marks indicate that the catchphrase was in use at the time and being used here to indicate that Cooper is metaphorically locking the door against new suitors now that she has met Murphy.
The next year we see the following in the Lima, Ohio Allen County Democrat of 30 October 1879 about the mining town of Leadville, Colorado:
To sum it all up, my advice to anyone thinking of going there would be “don’t,” unless they have a pocketfull of the “rhino” which they can afford to lose. I saw it was “Katy bar the door” with me unless I skipped, and I lost no time in skipping.
In short, we have no idea who Katy or Katie is or why she should be barring the door. All we know is that the phrase appears in the mid nineteenth-century and that it has a connection to folk music.
There is a legend that is often cited as the origin of the phrase, although the only evidence connection to the phrase is circumstantial—the story circulated around the time the phrase was developing. On 20 February 1437, King James I of Scotland was assassinated while staying at the Dominican chapterhouse in Perth, and, according to the legend, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Catherine Douglas, tried to save him by using her arm as a bolt to secure the door against the assassins. She was unsuccessful and her arm was broken, but her bravery was celebrated, and she became popularly known as Kate Barlass. According to the story, her descendants to this day bear a broken arm on their family crest and keep the name Barlass, but no such coat of arms is recorded in heraldic records.
Walter Scott repeated the legend in his 1827 Tales of a Grandfather, but the story did not catch the public’s attention until the publication of George Gilfillan’s 1860 Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets (which is also the first recorded mention of the name Barlass). Perhaps the most famous version of the legend was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1881 poem, The King’s Tragedy, but this poem was written well after the phrase had been established. None of these works of Victorian literature use the phrase Katy bar the door or anything remotely resembling it.
So, the chronology works for the Kate Barlass legend being the inspiration of the phrase, but that’s it. It is a possibility, but there is no particular reason to connect Kate Barlass with the Katy who is barring the door in the phrase.
Sources:
Burns, Robert. “Reels O Bogie” (before 1796). In The Merry Muses of Caledonia, James Barke and Sydney Goodsir Smith, eds. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964, 161–162. Archive.org.
“Get Up and Bar the Door.” Ancient and Modern Scots Songs. Edinburgh: Martin and Wotherspoon, 1769, 330–31. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s. v. Katy bar the door, phr.; work, v.
“The Jolly Beggar.” Ancient and Modern Scots Songs. Edinburgh: Martin and Wotherspoon, 1769, 46–47. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
“Katy Bar the Door.” Traditional Tune Archive, 1 December 2022.
“A Limaite Just From Leadville.” Allen County Democrat (Lima, Ohio), 30 October 1879, 3/4. Newspapers.com. [Archive metadata gives the paper name as Times-Democrat]
Morris, Peter. “‘Katy, bar the door’ (1872–1887).” ADS-L, 7 February 2016.
“The Old Smithy.” The Mirror, 6 February 1841, 91. Google Books.
Oram, Richard. “Kate Barlass—Catherine Douglas: History, Myth and Modern Folk Tale.” Part 1. Part 2. No date. Kingjames1ofscotland.co.uk.
O’Toole, Garson. “Re: ‘Katy, bar the door’ (1872–1887).” ADS-L, 6 February 2016.
Palmer, F.J. “A Christmas Song.” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, Ohio), 23 November 1850, 4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1850-11-23/ed-1/seq-4/
“The Radical Barbecue.” Louisiana Democrat (Alexandria, Louisiana), 2 October 1872, 2/3. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers.
Reinhelm. “The Old Smithy.” The Mirror, vol. 37, London: Hugh Cunningham, 1841, 91.
Scott, Walter. Tales of a Grandfather, vol. 1 of 4. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1827, 165–66. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“A Soldier’s Wedding.” Sedalia Weekly Bazoo (Sedalia, Missouri), 26 March 1878, 3/7. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers.
Taylor-Blake, Bonnie. “‘Katy, bar the door’ (1872–1887).” ADS-L, 6 February 2016.
Image credit: Alexander George Fraser, 19th century. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.