Delighted to be able to announce to Mudcatters that my book on Cumbrian dialect poet and song writer Robert Anderson,'The Cumberland Bard: Robert Anderson of Carlisle 1770-1833', has just been published! This year marks his 250th birthday, so it seemed a good time to do this. Bound in with the book is a facsimile of the 1828 edition of his 'Cumberland Ballads'. Many of Anderson's songs in dialect went on to have lives of their own as folk songs and were collected by Vaughan Williams and published in the Folk-Song Journal in the early twentieth century. Best-known among these is probably 'Sally Gray'- regularly sung by Cumbrian folkies - as well as 'Canny Cummerlan', 'The Bleckell Murry Neet', Gwordie Gill' etc. His 'Jenny's Complaint' was the original from which Bert Lloyd developed/wrote 'The Recruited Collier'. Anderson also wrote songs in standard English in the 1790s, many of which were performed at London's Vauxhall Gardens and circulated in cheaply printed broadsides, chapbooks and songsters. The book aims to place him squarely in the canon of Romantic poetry and song, alongside the Lake Poets. It's Wordsworth's 250th anniversary this year too, but I aim to fly the flag for our vernacular poets, like Anderson and John Stagg, also born the same year! The book is available only from Bookcase and Bookends shops in Carlisle, price £15 - and online from:
BooksCumbria.com