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Description: | This song gives a long description of a day at a rural fair. The fair described in the song would be typical of those held throughout Cumberland and the rest of Britain in the nineteenth century. Traditionally April and May were a time for fairs and games in celebration of Easter and Spring. Carel Fair was Carlisle's first official fair and dates back to 1353.This song is taken from a selection of songs written in the early nineteenth century by Robert Anderson. The book was published in Carlisle in 1820, by B. Scott. Keith Gregson, in his introduction to 'Cumbrian songs and ballads', gives a concise account of songs and ballads in Cumberland during the nineteenth century. The period was, he says, 'bounded in terms of songs and ballads in the border counties, by the works of Robert Burns to the north and those of Geordie Ridley, Joe Wilson and Ned Corvan to the east. During the heart of the period itself, the songwriters of Cumbria - Robert Anderson and Susanna Blamire, in particular - had important contributions to make to the British song and ballad world. Composing words and setting them to the popular tunes of the day ... these Cumbrians left many songs of merit which have since been neglected'.Many of the songs in this and other Cumbrian songbooks do of course have strong Scottish influences and most of the tunes to which they were sung were undoubtedly Scottish. However the majority of the songs still reflect the nature of Cumberland life at the time and for this reason alone are valuable in their own right. A particularly isolated county, Cumberland has a strongly preserved dialect and the rural nature of the area is reflected in songs which centre around relationships between market and farm, man and woman, and the surrounding landscape. ; A selection of songs by Cumberland composer Robert Anderson | Publisher: | B. Scott English Street ; Carlisle ; Cumberland | Rights holder: | rights holder : Border History Museum | Subjects: | fairs & entertainment festivities & leisure entertainment and sport & country life | Temporal: | start=1801;end=1840; | Source: | Folk Archive Resource North East | Identifier: | farne:H1516601 | Go to resource |
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