Traditional English folk song
"Spotted Cow" (Roud 956) is a traditional English folk song.
The following was written by A. L. Lloyd on the album sleeve notes of Peter Bellamy's "The Fox Jumps Over the Parson's Gate":This innocent idyllic tone and the bits of literary phrase—“cot”, “swain” and such—suggest that this song wasn't made by a country labourer but by an educated amateur writing “in the folk manner”. And so on examination it proves to be. It was written for the London pleasure gardens, appearing on a Vauxhall Gardens song-sheet in the 1740s and again at Ranelagh Gardens in the 1760s (with the locale fashionably moved to Scotland so that it concerns a swain named Jamie on the banks of the Tweed). It reappeared as a Regency parlour ballad in Fairburne's . It dropped out of fashionable use by the mid-nineteenth century, but country-folk retained their affection for it right up to the present, and it has turned up in Devon and Somerset, in Oxfordshire and Yorkshire, and of course in Norfolk, where Peter Bellamy found it in the repertoire of Harry Cox.
References.
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