Delkiow Sivy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Delkiow Sivy ("Strawberry Leaves" in Cornish (Kernewek)) is a Cornish folk song.
A young maiden is on her way to pick strawberry leaves which, so the song alleges, make young girls pretty. She meets a travelling tailor, who seeks to seduce her. "Who will clothe the child?" asks the young man. "Ah, but his father will be a tailor," the maiden concludes. The repeated refrain "fair face and yellow hair" probably alludes to the traditional view of female beauty.[1]
The original 'Late' Cornish version of "Delyow Syvy" can be found in both Inglis Gundry's 1966 Canow Kernow: Songs and Dances from Cornwall and in Peter Kennedy's 1997 Folksongs of Britain and Ireland. It has been suggested that the song is a Cornish version of the song "Sweet Nightingale".[2]
In her 2011 book Celtic Myth and Religion, Paice MacLeod claims that there are no surviving traditional Cornish songs and that the song was borrowed from England and sung in Cornish.[1] A Kernewek Kemmyn version titled "Delyo Syvy" appears, however, on the 1975 Sentinel Records album Starry-Gazey Pie, by Cornish folk singer Brenda Wootton, with accompaniment by Robert Bartlett.[3] The sleeve notes claim that the song is "the only living remnant" of the Cornish language and that it "has never been translated into English".[2]
This page is a candidate for copying over to Wikisource. |