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Country Life

[Trad. arr. Watersons]

The Watersons sang Country Life on their LP and CD For Pence and Spicy Ale. This track was also included on the World Music Network anthology The Rough Guide to English Roots Music. A live version recorded in June 1977 is on 6. Folkfestival auf der Lenzburg.

A.L. Lloyd commented in the For Pence and Spicy Ale sleeve notes:

Idyllic songs, praising country pleasures, mostly belong to a time before the agricultural revolution of the 18th and early 19th centuries turned the smallholders into a rural proletariat with grievances. The Watersons got this one from Mick Taylor, a sheepdog trainer of Hawes in Wensleydale.

Country Life was also recorded in 2004 by Eliza Carthy with the Oysterband at The Big Session Vol. 1. On this CD there is another completely different song with the same title. Steve Knightley sings lead on this track.

A further different version is in the Digital Tradition at the Mudcat Café. Jon Singer suggested "layland" (rather than the "laylum" I used to have in the chorus) on the authority of this dictionary entry:

Layland

\Lay"land`\, n. [Lay a meadow + land.] Land lying untilled; fallow ground. [Obs.] --Blount.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

Lyrics

Chorus (after each verse):

I like to rise when the sun she rises
Early in the morning
I like to hear them small birds singing
Merrily upon the layland
And hurrah for the life of a country boy
And to ramble in the new-mown hay

In spring we sow at the harvest mow
And that is how the seasons round they go
But if all the times if choose I may
't would be rambling through the new-mown hay

In winter when the sky is grey
We hedge and ditch our times away
But in the summer when the sun shines gay
We go rambling through the new-mown hay

Acknowledgements

Transcribed by Garry Gillard.