Annotation:Four Bare Legs Together

Back to Four Bare Legs Together

---

FOUR BARE LEGS TOGETHER. English, Scottish; Slip Jig and Air. England, Northumberland. F Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. The melody appears in William Vickers' Northumbrian manuscript [1], c. 1770, Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (no. 26), and in Johnson's Scots Musical Museum. The suggestive title, finds Pete Coe, is a line from a song called "Maggie's Tocher" printed by Herd in his Ancient Scots Songs (c. 1769), although the line seems innocent enough:

The bairns are coming on,
And they'll cry, O their mither!
We have nouther pat nor pan,
But four bare legs the gither.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Knowles (A Northern Lass), 1995; p. 24.

Recorded sources: Beautiful Jo BEJOCD-36, Dave Shepherd & Becky Price - "Ashburnham." Front Hall FHR-08, Alistair Anderson - "Traditional Tunes" (1976).

---

Back to Four Bare Legs Together