The Arcade, Dewsbury, early 1900s.
The Green Linnet
This song in local dialect appears to by a hybrid of the old song ‘Hunt the Cutty Wren’ and an old Nursery Rhyme, ‘We'll go to the wood, says Richard to Robin’, in ‘The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes’ published in 1951.
The Green Linnet is more commonly called the Greenfinch. The lads wouldn’t be ‘Copping (catching) a Green Linnet’ nowadays as the bird is now a protected species by The Wildlife Countryside Act 1981. This version, in the local West Riding dialect, I learnt it from Keith Pearson, proprietor of Auty’s Music Shop, The Arcade, Dewsbury. Keith was one of the residents at Dewsbury Folk Club in the mid-1960s and fiddle player with the 'Yorkshire Mixtures Ceilidh Band'.
