Cecil Sharp's Note 46 (1916)

No. 46. Fanny Blair

The words that I took down from the singer of this song were very corrupt and almost unintelligible. I have therefore substituted lines taken from a Catnach broadside in my possession.

The tune is a very curious one. The singer varied both the seventh and third notes of the scale, sometimes singing them major and sometimes minor in a most capricious manner, so that I can only give the tune in the form in which he most frequently sang it. In English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (pp. 71, 72), I have expressed the opinion that in my experience English folksingers very rarely vary the notes of the mode, except, of course, in Mixolydian-Dorian tunes. Mr. Percy Grainger’s researches in Lincolnshire, however (Journal of the Folk-Song Society, volume iii, pp. 147–242), appear to show that this feeling for the pure diatonic scale is not shared by the folksingers of that county.