Note: A song in local dialect about a "turnip hoer" recorded at a barn dance in West Lavington, Wiltshire. One verse only. "Fred Jordan learned this song from a gamekeeper who came from Buckinghamshire in 1940. The version in English County Songs was sent to Lucy Broadwood by a man living in Oxfordshire but he too came from Buckinghamshire. Yet the song has attached itself to Wiltshire and was adopted as the regimental march of the Wiltshire Regiment (originally the 62nd and 99th Foot) now amalgamated with the Berkshire Regiment in the Duke of Edinburgh's Royal Regiment. Lucy Broadwood remarked in 1893 that the song was a favourite with soldiers and popular in many counties. Fred Perrier our Wiltshire singer [from whom Kennedy had recorded another version in 1950] in fact learned the song from the soldiers on Salisbury Plain when they first came to train in the fields where he was working in the 1890s." —Peter Kennedy Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (1975). Chorus: For the flies the flies/The flies got on the turnips/It's all me eye and no use to try/To keep 'em off them turnips."
About the session: This session is comprised of songs Lomax dubbed from Peter Kennedy for possible use on the English volume of the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music.
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