Sleeve notes:
"There was a lad was born in Kyle, But whatna day o' whatna style, I
doubt it's hardly worth the while Tae be sae nice wi' Robin." Robert
Burns wrote this song about himself and relates how an old tinker
woman, "the gossip", tells the fortune of the new-born babe. He did
indeed "gar the bonnie lassiesjie aspar", being the father of
fifteen children, so it's not surprising that most of his songs
revolve around "the lassies". They are not, however, the effeminate
warblings of the love-sick .swain, but real, down-to-earth country
tales of love-making', told in the ploughman's unpretentious style.
"Does the train-attended carriage Through the country lighter rove?
" Does the sober bed of marriage Witness brighter scenes of love?" '
Burns said "I am no dab at fine-drawn letter writing. I sit down
when necessitated to write as I would sit down to beat hemp".
He collected and mended hundreds of Scottish ". folk-songs saying
"Let any poet, if he chooses, take up the idea of another and work
it into a piece of his own, but let him mend it as the Highlander
mended his gun. He gave it a new lock, a new stock and a new
barrel". Such was his knowledge and understanding of his own people
that it is almost impossible to determine how much or how little he
contributed to any particular song.
This album is an attempt at rescuing his songs (described by Hugh
MacDiarmid as "poetry of the intestines") from the Victorian
drawing-room, and putting them back in the living-rooms of the
ordinary folk where the.y belong.
Nigel Denver sings them as they must have been sung at country
weddings or at fire-side ceilidhs. These are folk-songs, not Bel
Canto exercises.
Jim McLean, 1968
