Weary Cutters

At the moment my computer is playing 'Steeleye Span - The Crysalis years' - a triple cd set that I bought many years ago and ripped several years ago. I'm very familar with the first two albums, "Below the salt" and 'A parcel of rogues'¹ as these were compulsory listening in the years 1971-3. I'm also familiar with their third album with Bob Johnson², 'Now we are six' (see the Tim Hart obituary linked previously) but the final two albums in this set, 'Commoners Crown' and 'All around my hat' are not familiar at all.

I have to admit that listening to the set all the way through leads to auditory fatigue, so I don't/can't normally listen closely to those last two. But this morning, by the time I came to sit at the computer, it was playing 'Commons Crown' and I was able to listen properly to this.

The first thing that my ears picked up was the following lyric

O the weary cutters and O the weary sea
O the weary cutters have taken my laddie from me
They've pressed him far away foreign
With Nelson beyond the salt sea

O the lousy cutters and O the weary sea
O the lousy cutters have stolen my laddie from me
They always come in the night
They never come in the day
They come at night and steal the laddies away

Those words seem very familiar to me, but the melody was hard to catch, with Maddy Prior singing harmony with herself. Then it struck me: this song, 'Weary Cutters', is sung at the beginning of 'Blue's Gaen Oot O' the Fashion' by Rachel Unthank and the Winterset (as it was then) on 'The Bairns³'!

Three cheers for the folk tradition that allows modern musicians to take old songs and bend them to their will.

Internal links
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[2] 1695
[3] 353

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