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.
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.
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