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Ewan McVicar Nonsense songs to dance tunes (21) RE: Nonsense songs to dance tunes 29 May 99


Having just recently done a bunch of research work on Scots kids' song I have a bundle of such lyrics.
Look out next year for Volume 8 of the Greig Duncan Collection which has 20 or 30 of them. Many many more in the School of Scottish Studies archives.
Plus new ones are made all the time, by kids and adults - often as ways of rememebring fiddle / pipe tunes you are teaching or learning, and more often by applying a verse you like to a tune you like.
E. g. a family group came up to me one time, people from Kingussie, and sang me thir family song, to the tune of Brochan Lom
Jock White, Jock White, far'd ye get the bairn x3
Ah got it fae a tinkie wifie comin fae the Nairn
I've found versions of this to other tunes and linked to other placenames.
Ian, Bert and Frank - I'd be mightily grateful if you can tell me, either here or direct to me at [EwanMcVicar@compuserve.com]where (country / town) and when (year/decade) you heard your versions of Charlie / Aunty Mary. My PhD thesis title is Aunty Mary Had A Canary. I have some 40 variants, split into 7 or 8 families, going back to Barnum and Bailey had a canary, plus Piper Findlater (who won his VC for fearlessly playing -perhaps - The Cock of The North at the Battle of Dargai) and Sister Mary of the Boer War. I've had no previous clues as to how the drawers came in, till Ian's and Bert's lines. Tell me more, please!
Another element that now occurs to me is
Chase me Charlie, chase me Charlie, over the garden wall
which I think of as an English 'music hall' song, but which now clearly is related to Auntie Mary in some manner.


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