My Mary

[ Roud V48250 ; Robert Tannahill]

Jim Malcolm sang My Mary in 2010 on the Brechin All anthology The Complete Songs of Robert Tannahill Volume II and in 2014 on his CD The Corncrake. He noted:

I learned this Robert Tannahill song for the Tannahill collection of CDs produced by Dr Fred Freeman. It always makes me think of my late granny Mary, who was from the same part of the world as Tannahill. She often used to tell us she was a real looker as a young lady, which fits the song nicely.

Lyrics

Jim Malcolm sings My Mary

My Mary is a bonny lassie
Sweet as dewy morn,
When fancy tunes her rural reed,
Beside the upland thorn;
She lives ahint yon sunny knowe,
Where flow’rs in wild profusion grow,
Where spreading birks and hazels throw
Their shadows o’er the burn.

’Tis no’ the streamlet-skirted wood,
Wi’ a’ its leafy bow’rs,
That gars me wait in solitude
Among the wild-sprung flow’rs;
But aft I cast a langing e’e,
Down frae the bank, out owre the lea,
There haply I my lass may see,
As through the broom she scours.

Yestreen I met my bonny lassie,
Coming frae the toon,
We raptur’d sunk in ither’s arms
And prest the breckans down;
The pairtrick sung his e’ening note,
The rye-craik rispt his clam’rous throat,
While there the heav’nly vow I got
That arl’t her my own.