I love Kate Rusby's singing, but what a pity she/BBC chose to include The Recruited Collier as an example of a 'traditional' song. Kate admits that there's some debate about the song - whether it comes from the North East or Yorkshire. A pity Kate or programme makers didn't do their research properly.

In fact it's a Cumbrian song, originally with a pastoral setting and rather different words (nothing to do with miners)by dialect poet Robert Anderson, and was then re-written by Bert Lloyd as a song of the Cumbrian coalfields, and set to his own tune.

For Mudcat thread about this, with link to article about it, see:

thread.cfm?threadid=39035#1023188


Sue