City Waites - comments

English group performing early music and traditional songs and tunes using replicas of period instruments.


Lyrics.

1. Diddle Diddle, or the Kind Country Lovers

Text: Pepys Collection. Tune: Lavenders Green is referred to in the 17th century broadsheet but no printed source is available before E.F. Rimbault's Nursery Rhymes c 1846 when it appears to have been recovered from aural tradition.

Chorus: Lavenders Green, Lavenders Blue, You must love me, 'cos I love you.

Call up your maids, set them to work,
Some to make hay, some to the rock,
Some to make hay, some to the corn,
While you and I keep the bed warm
Recorded 1995. Running time 74 minutes 25 seconds. Lucy Skeaping (soprano, baroque violin), Douglas Wootton (tenor, lute, bandora, cittern, tabor), Roddy Skeaping (baroque, violin, bass viol, voice, musical arrangements), Michael Brain (baroque bassoon, recorders, voice), Rubin Jeffrey (baroque guitar, cittern), Mike Sargeant (early Northumbrian bagpipes, Flemish bagpipes), David Chatterley (hurdy-gurdy). 

The band.

Taking their name from the professional town musicians of earlier times, The City Waites specialise in the songs and dances of the street and countryside, the stage and tavern - the music of the common man.
- Huth collection of Seventy-Nine Blackletter Ballads (track 23)


Last updated on 11/08/2005