foxhunting songs

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.

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.