Note Note — No 15 SWEET NIGHTINGALE

15. Sweet Nightingale. In "Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England," by Robert Bell, London, 1857, the author says: "This curious ditty, which may be confidently assigned to the 17th century ... we first heard in Germany at Marienberg on the Moselle. The singers were four Cornish miners, who were at that time, 1854, employed at some lead mines near the town of Zell. The leader, or captain, John Stocker, said that the song was an established favourite with the miners of Cornwall and Devonshire, and was always sung on the pay-days and at the wakes; and that his grandfather, who died thirty years before, at the age of a hundred years, used to sing the song, and say it was very old. The tune is plaintive and original." Unfortunately Mr. Bell does not give the tune. The air was first sent me by E.F. Stevens, Esq., of the Terrace, St. Ives, who wrote that the melody "had run in his head any time these eight and thirty years." We have since had it from a good many old men in Cornwall, and always to the same air. They assert that it is a duet, and was so set in our first edition.