The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #63047   Message #1021980
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
19-Sep-03 - 03:31 PM
Thread Name: Ten representative English folk songs?
Subject: RE: Ten representative English folk songs?
Phil Tanner, however, is only one of a great many people who sang Banks of the Sweet Primroses. It was so widespread in the early years of the 20th century that the Hammond brothers, for example, didn't bother noting it at all.

The "frog" link with Scotland rests solely on a mention in The Complaynt of Scotland (1549) of a song called The frog cam to the myl dur: this may, or may not, refer to a Scottish song, which may, or may not, have been a form of A moste Strange weddinge of the ffrogge and the mowse, which was licensed to Edward White, 21 November 1580. It doesn't survive; the earliest extant text is in Ravenscroft's Melismata of 1611.

I don't think we need to worry too much about these two.