kytrad: I think you are being a little unfair to use words like "sniggerring" and "filth" to describe anyody reading an innuendo into the man getting his fiddle out of the knapsack, and delighting her with the touch of the string etc. Perhaps there is a difference here between an American approach and an English approach to the song. Now, I dont consider myself a filthy sniggerer, but I have to say there has never been any doubt in my mind as what the fiddle refers to in this song, and as I said early I recorded the source singer Aubrey Cantwell performing this song in an English pub. We all sang along, we knew it was a beautiful song about nature and birds and the spring, but we also knew it was about something else as well. Something just as beautiful. Hearing that song in that pub sung by that man has rung in my soul down the forty years since it happened, and it wasnt filthy at all. But it was certainly bawdy.