The Shearin's No For You: A Song History

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"The Shearin's No For You" is a Scots song from the northeast Lowlands of Scotland, and its "shearin'" is the cutting of the grain harvest rather than of sheep.[1][2] Folklorist Ed Miller hears it as a man warning his pregnant partner to stay out of the harvest field, though he notes that other versions give the woman a voice of complaint at being used and left.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index summarises the song as a dialogue in which a pregnant young woman blames her lover for her plight and he tells her to mind the child.[3] The sources consulted here treat it as an anonymous traditional song and name no author; none of them connects it with Robert Burns.[1][2][3]

Woodcut of a reaper seen from behind, cutting wheat in a field

Jean-François Millet, The Wheat Reaper, woodcut on chine collé, 1853. A French harvest scene, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Its age is uncertain: notes by some singers suggest an early-nineteenth-century origin, while the earliest date the Ballad Index gives for it is 1906, from the Greig collection.[2][3] Its tune also carries Thomas Lyle's "Kelvin Grove," whose words first appeared in The Harp of Renfrewshire (1819), and sources differ over how much of that text belongs to John Sim.[2][3][4] The air itself was printed as "Kelvin Water" in R. A. Smith's The Scottish Minstrel, and the Traditional Tune Archive considers it older than that printing.[2][4] Peter Kennedy recorded Jeannie Robertson singing it in 1953, and later recordings include Ray and Archie Fisher (1966), Jean Redpath (1979) and the Tannahill Weavers (1996).[2]

Gail L. Van Amberg arranges it in her MaxDAD Songbook, written for the five-string MaxDAD mountain dulcimer tuned DADAD, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]

Our book that contains the song "The Shearin's No For You"

Sources

  1. Country Dance & Song Society: "May 2019: The Shearin's No' For You".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Shearin's Not for You / Tak' the Buckles Frae Your Sheen / Bonnie Lassie O".
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Shearin's Nae for You".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Kelvin Grove (1)".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Gail L. Van Amberg, MaxDAD Songbook".
  6. Image: Jean-François Millet, The Wheat Reaper, woodcut on chine collé, 1853. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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