Annotation:Come You Not from Newcastle?

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COME YOU NOT FROM NEWCASTLE? AKA and see "Newcastle (1)." English, Air (4/4 time). D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). One part. A song version of the country dance tune entitled "Newcastle" that appears in John Playford's first edition of The English Dancing Master (London, 1651), and in subsequent editions, through the eighth, published in 1690, after which is was deleted from the long-running series. It is can sometimes be heard in modern sessions paired with Playford's "Portsmouth". However, the song version seems to have been more recent revival of the Dancing Master tune, which did not survive in tradition. Maclom Douglas [Mudcat] quotes Claude M Simpson (The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music, 82-3;): "The trimeter quatrains are so lyrical that is difficult to accept the forcings necessary in putting them to the dance tune. In all likelihood the surviving tune is not the one which must have had some currency in Elizabethan days and in the early part of the seventeenth century".

Come You Not From Newcastle?
Come you not from newcastle?
Come you not there away?
O met you not my true love,
Riding on a bonny bay?
Why should not i love my love?
Why should not my love love me?
Why should not i speed after him,
Since love to all is free?

See also "Why should I not like my love?."

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Northumbrian Pipers' Tune Book, 1981; p. 31.

Recorded sources:




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