Familiar Songs - Their Authors & Histories

300 traditional songs, inc sheet music with full piano accompaniment & lyrics.

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396
OUR FAMILIAR SONGS.
Boston, Mass., but she never received any return. Her slowly accumulated savings were in the venture, and in her old age the school-teacher poetess had to seek such employment as she could find about the neighborhood. She was nurse and general helper in sudden family emergencies. Mrs. Fullerton tells of having ouce given her clothing, which her independence forbade her to take away, but finally she returned for it when harder pressed by poverty. At last she wandered to Glasgow, and two of the baillies of Greenock found her admittance to the poor-house, as " a poor woman in distress, a stranger who had been wandering about." There she died the next day, April 3, 1765.
Burns says that " There's Nae luck about the house " came on the streets as a ballad about 1771-'2, ten or eleven years before Mrs. Mickle thinks her husband wrote it. Mrs. Fullerton not only left her testimony to having heard Jean Adam sing it as her own, with her daughter, who married a Crawfurd, but Mrs. Crawfurd says: "My aunt, Mrs. Crawfurd of Cartsburn, often sang it as a song of Jean Adam's."
The scenery and expressions of the song are suited to the location of the west of Scotland, and peculiarly to Greenock. The name of the hero, Colin, while almost unknown in other parts of Scotland, is very common in this; and the tradition of the town even points to a particular Colin and Jean—Colin and Jean Campbell,—as the originals of the song. In the local phrase, " Jean made a great work about her man," and even the exqui­site fancy of the " foot with music in't, as he comes up the stair," has an added pictur-esqueness from the fact, that from the quay up to the " quay-head," where the well-to-do-people had their homes, there was a mighty stairway, built of sounding Norway deal.
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this a time to talk lit - tie Kate her cot
o> wark? Ye jades, fling by your wheel!             I*
ton gown, And Jock his Sun - day coat;            And
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