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Belvedere Hounds drawn by D.T. CarlisleContinuing with our musical theme—songs of foxhunting—does your hunt have a song? Mine does. Yours could, too.

Somewhere around fifty years ago, the late Alexander Mackay-Smith, MFH found himself confined to the hospital with a broken leg from a hunting accident. With time on his hands, he set about composing a hunting song for his hunt. He took the music and theme of a popular hunting song, “Reynard the Fox,” and rewrote the lyrics using well-known places, features, and people from the Blue Ridge Hunt.

Plagiarism? Of course not! Virtually all the traditional hunting songs we know are retreads of even more ancient English and Irish nursery songs or folk tunes with hunting lyrics set to them.

If you have a poet in your hunt, give him or her our new CD, Songs of Foxhunting, and download the hunting songs—music and lyrics—from the website. Ask your lyricist to choose one of the tunes and rewrite the lyrics to memorialize a great hunt, to honor a special member, or to sing the praises of a revered Master.

Ed Kelly is elected president of the MFHA. Jim Duggan photo

The Annual Meeting of the MFHA was held Friday, January 28, 2011 at the Union Club in New York. A foot of snow had fallen on the city Wednesday night, yet when I arrived at Pennsylvania Station on Thursday, the north-south avenues were completely cleared. To be sure, the east-west streets were plowed only one lane wide with cars totally buried under snow on both sides, but the taxicabs were out doing "business as usual" and commerce carried on!

Edward Kelly, MFH of the Golden’s Bridge Hounds (NY), was elected president of the Association and commences a three-year term. Kelly succeeds outgoing president G. Marvin Beeman, MFH of the Arapahoe Hunt (CO). Jack van Nagell, MFH of the Iroquois Hunt (KY), was elected First Vice President and thus stands in line to become president after Kelly completes his term of office. Tony Leahy, MFH and huntsman of the Fox River Valley Hunt (IL) and the Cornwall Hounds (IL), was elected second vice-president thereby stepping into the line of succession to the presidency in six more years.

Foxhunting Life loves its subscribers! To show our appreciation and to give you more value for your annual subscription, all FHL subscribers now receive an automatic ten percent discount off the list price on all items in the Bookstore: books, calendars, videos, and CDs. This new policy goes into effect immediately. (And don’t forget, subscribers can post ads free of charge in our Classified Ad section as well.) Thank you all for your enthusiastic reception of Foxhunting Life in 2010, our maiden year. We have more exciting offerings planned for 2011!

Readers will notice, we hope, that FHL’s Home Page is continually being updated with new articles. As new articles are posted, the older material is pushed lower on the Home Page until it disappears. Or does it? No, it doesn’t! Not completely, anyway. Note that each article on the Home Page has a category heading in red type, whether it be Art, Literature, Hunt Reports, People, my Blog, whatever. These articles can always be recovered under their appropriate headings under the Horse and Hound drop-down menu above, whether they are still on the Home Page or long since gone. So, anytime you wish to see articles on a particular subject, or want to go back to an old article you remember seeing on the Home Page, just find the appropriate category in the drop-down menus and click!

If you’re scratching your head for another gift for your favorite foxhunter, how about a year’s subscription to Foxhunting Life? Your lucky recipient will enjoy total access to the next twelve months of constantly changing articles; news; book reviews; sporting artist profiles; hunt breakfast recipes; access to our Panel of Experts; calls on the horn video; songs of foxhunting; hunt reports from North America, Ireland, and England; photo galleries; bookstore; guides to correct hunt attire, hunting etiquette, glossary of hunting terms; travel directories for lodging, stabling, and hirelings. Why there’s hardly an aspect of foxhunting for which FHL doesn’t provide entertaining or useful information! And we’re always coming up with wacky and fun new ideas, like downloading hunting horn calls for your cell phone ring tones and MP-3 files of your favorite hunting songs. Here’s How 1. If you are a subscriber, you must first logout by going to the “Login/Subscribe” drop-down menu at the upper right.2. Click on the “Click Here to Subscribe” button at the top of the right-hand column.3. Fill in the required information, choosing a username and password. (They will be able to change those easily, once they logon.)4. Near the bottom of that screen there is a box labeled “Explain.” Here you can type, “Gift subscription from (your name)” or any other message you would like us to forward to the recipient.5. Complete the subscription process and you will have presented someone with total access to all the articles, news, and resources on Foxhunting Life as well as our bi-monthly e-letter sent to their email address. Foxhunting Life wishes all our subscribers a very Merry Christmas, and we thank you sincerely for your enthusiasm over our new website as our first year draws to a close.

I spent a grand week in Aiken, South Carolina recently. It was business first, with three book signings scheduled: one at the beautiful Willcox Hotel on Tuesday (Horsemen’s Night); Wednesday at Equine Divine, a lovely gift shop for all things equine; and Thursday in Camden at the Tack Room. It was a week to see old friends and make new friends. After three days of business, there was a day’s hunting with George and Jeannie Thomas, MFHs of the Why Worry Hounds. A Hunt Report of that day is in the works to be posted shortly.

I stayed with my friend Art Richardson, ex-MFH of the Wayne-Du Page Hunt in Illinois. Art and wife Judy leave the cold weather behind every year and spend the winter months in Aiken. Art hunts with the Aiken packs and brings his two grand-daughters, Mackenzie and Virginia, to visit and hunt with him as often as possible. Life is good for us.

Well...most of us. For Art’s son Michael, life could be better. Michael is a horseman and was a foxhunter in his younger years. At the age of twenty, Michael was involved in an automobile accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. That’s not the current problem, though.

One night in 1829, John Woodcock Graves sat in his parlor with John Peel, a farmer, horse dealer, and foxhunter whose hounds were highly celebrated by the local sheep farmers. From the adjoining room, Graves overheard his son's granny singing an ancient Irish melody to the child. Graves took that old melody and wrote a new set of lyrics to honor his friend, John Peel.

"I sang it to poor Peel," Graves wrote, "who smiled through a stream of tears which fell down his manly cheeks, and I well remember saying to him in a joking style, ‘By Jove, Peel, you’ll be sung when we’re both run to earth!’"

Forty years later, William Metcalfe, Choirmaster of Carlisle Cathedral, heard the song at a banquet. He set down the tune in musical notation for the first time together with Graves’ words, composed a piano accompaniment, and had it performed locally. He went on to London with his choir and on May 22, 1869 performed the song at the dinner of the Cumberland Benevolent Society from whence it spread quickly over the English-speaking world, propelling John Peel into the most famous foxhunter of all time.

Before TV, video games, and texting, foxhunters used to entertain themselves with stories, poems, and songs. Foxhunting families would often break into song at the table after dinner, and windows rattled at many a hunt breakfast with songs of foxhunting.

My good friend Caroline Treviranus Leake remembers impromptu songfests at the dinner table led by her step-father, the late Alexander Mackay-Smith. The entire family—mother Marilyn and sisters Denya and Leslie—would join in. Caroline remembers those times with the greatest of pleasure—times of togetherness, good cheer, and shared enjoyment.

What a great response you made to our Hunt Breakfast Recipe Contest! We got some mouth-watering recipes that will surely be big hits with cold and hungry foxhunters.

For ease of preparation and instant warmth, Cathy Springer’s Tortellini and Meatball Soup will be hard to beat. We’ve already received a rave notice from someone who served it at a hunt breakfast and to her family at the dinner table.

Here are the contest rules once more:

This is the season for Opening Meets. We’ve been getting some lovely photographs of that special day, so we decided to populate our website banner with them. Take a look at the show in our Foxhunting Life banner above! Although Virginia is well-represented, we need images of Opening Meets from other hunting countries as well. If you have a good photo of your hunt’s Opening Meet, send it to us. Go to the Horse and Hound drop-down menu and click on How to Submit. Note: When selecting photos to send us, choose ones that will fit into the long horizontal format you see in the banner above.