Note Note — No 83 A NUTTING WE WILL GO

83. A Nutting we will go. Taken down from J. Gerrard, an old man, nearly blind, at Cullyhole, near Chagford, from Robert Hard, and again at Menheniot, and also from James Parsons. Bunting, in his "Irish Melodies," 1840, gives the same tune to a fragment of the same words, and says that he took it down in 1792 from Duncan, a harper. Duncan remembered a portion of a tune he had heard, perhaps, from English soldiers, and eked it out with some other tune. Then came S. Lover, and he took this air from Bunting, and wrote to it "The Lowbacked Car." But the original melody is found, not only in Devon and Cornwall, but also in the North, and Mr. Kidson gives it in his "Traditional Tunes," as "With Henry Hunt we'll go," a song sung in Manchester in connection with the arrest of Hunt in 1819. To the same air was set "The Plains of Waterloo." "The Lowbacked Car" has become popular through its words, and the inartistic quality of a patchwork tune has been forgiven for their sake.