Edwin Hall
Music, Food, Art, and Foxhunting
Karen Myers photoI can’t help but notice that this week’s topics constitute a comprehensive and balanced offering. Music, food, art, and foxhunting. What more could any sportsman want from life? Okay, okay, but let's just leave it this way!
Music:
Listen, then download another of Edwin Hall’s country foxhunting songs. Learn the chorus, and you won’t be able to resist singing along!
Food:
Check out the winners in this year’s hunt breakfast recipe contest. As our judge Juliet Mackay-Smith says, there are so many fine recipes in so many categories that selecting the winners presented her with very hard choices.
Art:
Linda Volrath describes art as a visual language in which the artist attempts to capture a fleeting image along with the mood of the moment and communicate it to the viewer in a permanent way. Foxhunting Life is proud to feature both her oil paintings and the philosophy behind her endeavors.
Free Offer: Foxhunting Songs, Country Style
To mark the end of the hunting season Foxhunting Life is making another audio download available. Listen to “St. Hubert,” composed and performed by foxhunter Edwin Hall, and download the MP-3 audio file to your own computer with our compliments. We hope the music will keep you company in your vehicle and help keep your spirits up all summer.
Ed Hall writes foxhunting songs with a purely America country flavor. So how did he come to write a song about St. Hubert, I wondered.
What? No Music?
Edwin Hall
I wasn’t fortunate enough as a child to have horses or to be from a horsey family. However, we lived in rural Cleveland County, North Carolina, where a great many people had horses. Being the son of the local Baptist minister, I knew everyone in the community, and, between the ages of eight and thirteen, I was allowed to ride the horses of various church members. At the age of ten or so, I distinctly recall telling Carl DeBrew that I wanted to foxhunt when I grew up. I lived next door to Carl’s wonderful grandparents, who had a true family farm. They enriched my childhood more than any other people, including my own grandparents. Mr. Lee and Miss Carey DeBrew treated me like one of their own grandchildren, and I was allowed to ride their mule anytime I wanted (when it was not working!). Carl had two horses and was great about letting me ride them.
Songs of Foxhunting—Country Style
Karen Myers photo
Foxhunting songs with a purely American accent! Would you like to hear a sample? Download lyrics and the MP3 audio file and listen to Coyote Line by Edwin Hall—authentic Americana. If you have the lyrics in your hand and the music playing, you won’t be able to resist joining in on the chorus! Coyote Line is just one of ten songs in Ed Hall's CD, Meeting in the Morning, available now in our Bookstore.
Also available as promised is a new CD production of Alexander Mackay-Smith's The Songs of Foxhunting---a collection of twenty traditional songs, including John Peel; Here’s a Health to Every Sportsman; Drink Puppy, Drink; The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night; and many more favorites. There’s too much joy in singing to let those old songs fade away. Not only have they been sung for hundreds of years, but most of them are based on lyrics from the hunting field put to even older English and Irish music. In short, they’re ancient. But let's go back to Ed Hall and his country music.
